University of Washington

Victor Klee and Branko Grunbaum founded several branches of modern combinatorics and discrete geometry and spent their long careers (a total of 100 years between them) at the University of Washington in Seattle. Klee passed away in 2007 and Grunbaum...

Four ordered points on the projective line, up to projective equivalence, are classified by the cross ratio, a notion introduced by Cayley. This theory can be extended to more points, leading to one of the first important examples of an invariant...

We introduce and explore some concepts of weak solution for particular nonlinear partial differential equations.These notions have their roots in the fundamental work of A. D. Aleksandrov on the Monge-Ampere measure. We also consider applications to...

While univariate polynomial interpolation has been a basic tool of scientific computing for hundreds of years, multivariate polynomial interpolation is much less understood. Already the question from which polynomial space to choose an interpolant to...

How do simple local interactions combine to produce complex large-scale structure and patterns? The abelian sandpile model provides a beautiful test case. I'll discuss a pair of conjectures about the scale invariance and dimensional reduction of the...

Sorting a list of items is perhaps the most familiar problem of computer science. If one must do this by swapping neighbouring pairs, the worst initial condition is when the n items are in reverse order, in which case n choose 2 swaps are needed. A...

Probability theory is concerned with regularities in random processes, such as laws of large numbers and limit-shape theorems. Recent work by researchers at the interface between probability and combinatorics shows that many of these regularities...

The Pacific Northwest Geometry Seminar (PNGS) is a regional meeting for geometers of all kinds. It is held every fall and spring, and every other winter, rotating among the following participating institutions: Oregon State University Portland State...