University of Victoria

An highly active research area is concerned with finding conditions on sparse sets that ensure the existence of many geometric patterns. I will present some results in this direction connecting Newhouse thickness and its generalizations to higher...

The field of DNA Topology includes the study of DNA geometry (supercoiling) and topology (knots and links) and their effects on DNA in vitro and in vivo. Statistical mechanics-based polygonal models of DNA have proved useful for addressing many...

This alternative math education event will present fun activities to explore math and computer science concepts to children (and adults!) using games and art! Lots of hands-on activities including: Sorting network An impossible balancing act...

I will discuss a problem that appeared on MathOverflow and its solution by the user “Fedja”. The result we will demonstrate is that if T is subset of the reals with Hausdorff dimension exceeding ½, then there is a positive probability that a standard...

A classical problem in combinatorial geometry, posed by Erdős in 1946, asks to determine the maximum number of unit segments in a set of n points in the plane. Since then a great variety of extremal problems in finite planar point sets have been...

In this talk, we consider a notion of stability for solutions of random optimization problems based on small perturbations of the input data and inspired by the technique for proving CLT using Stein's method as illustrated with examples by Chatterjee...

Bounded density shifts are examples of hereditary subshifts. Bounded density shifts are defined by disallowing words whose sum of entries exceeds a value depending on the length of the word. After presenting some examples and reviewing the concepts...

Recent interactions between probability and number theory proved fruitful. In particular, random multiplicative functions (RMFs) are random models for partial sums of the Möbius function and Dirichlet characters, which are related to L-functions like...

In how many ways can an m x n chessboard be tiled using 2 x 1 tiles? The solution is given by the number of perfect matchings in a related graph. Although computationally difficult in general, in this circumstance we are able to efficiently count...

An (m, n)-mixed graph consists of a set of vertices, any two of which may be joined by either an edge of one of m colours or an arc of one of n colours, or not be joined at all. The operation of switching at a vertex v of an (m, n)-mixed graph with...