Uvic - PIMS Distinguished Lecture Colloquium: Pablo Shmerkin

How many lines are spanned by a set of planar points?. If the points are collinear, then the answer is clearly "one". If they are not collinear, however, several different answers exist when sets are finite and "how many" is measured by cardinality. I will discuss a bit of the history of this problem and present a recent extension to the discretized and continuum settings, obtained in collaboration with T. Orponen and H. Wang. No specialized background will be assumed.

Biography: Pablo is a leader in the area of fractal geometry. He is a recent speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians; and a Canada Research Chair at UBC.