Past Events

In an introduction to proofs course, students learn to write proofs informally in the language of set theory and classical logic. In this talk, I'll explore the alternate possibility of teaching students to write proofs informally in the language of...

An interesting question in spectral graph theory is about the structure of the eigenvectors of matrices associated with graphs. A graph is weakly Hadamard diagonalizable (WHD) if its Laplacian matrix L can be diagonalized with a weakly Hadamard...

Decompositions of combinatorial structures translate very often to functional equations with positive coefficients for their generating functions. A theorem by Bender says that if the generating function is univariate and the equation not linear, the...

Join us for this event, part of the Seminar Series: Mathematics of Ethical Decision-making Systems. Agenda 3:00pm Dr. Midori Ogasawara, the social consequences of surveillance and data collection. 3:30pm Break for refreshments 4:00pm Patricia Cochran...

Mathematics has developed an increasingly “higher dimensional” point of view of when different things deserve the same name, categorifying the traditional logical notion of equality to isomorphism (from Greek isos “equal” and morphe “form” or “shape”...

Vertex operator algebras (VOAs) are a mathematical approach to quantum field theories which won their creator a Fields medal. But they are highly complicated structures -- if you haven't already learned what they are, it is surely best if you never...

Products of permutations are used to model problems in fields ranging from representation theory and algebraic geometry to topological graph theory. I will show how probability can be used to study such problems, with a focus on how graphs may be...

Join us for this event, part of the Seminar Series: Mathematics of Ethical Decision-making Systems

I will describe a new approach for exhaustively generating combinatorial objects by combining a satisfiability (SAT) solver with an isomorph-free exhaustive generation method such as orderly generation. The SAT solver is able to limit the search to...

We improve the best known to date result of Dress-Iwaniec-Tenenbaum, getting (log x)^2 instead of (log x)^(5/2). We use a weighted form of Vaughan's identity, allowing a smooth truncation inside the procedure, and an estimate due to Barban-Vehov and...