Past Events

Given access to a collection of $m$ sets over a ground set of $n$ elements, the classic set cover problem asks for the minimum number of sets in the collection

The smallest eigenvalue of a graph is closely related to other graph parameters such as the independence number, the chromatic number or the max-cut. In this talk, I will describe

The Goulden-Jackson Cluster method is a powerful way for finding the generating function for the number of words avoiding consecutive patterns. We will first discuss this method and some of

The information theory community has traditionally studied two different models for communication. The Shannon-theoretic model treats the channel’s impact as random, so codes must correct most error patterns of a

We discuss the number of proper colorings of the hypercube given q colors. When q=2, it is easy to see that there are only 2 possible colorings. However, it is

Comparisons are a classical and well studied algorithmic tool that is used in a variety of contexts and applications. We will discuss two manifestations of the expressiveness of these queries

The objective of this workshop is to explore opportunities for applied mathematicians and computational scientists to develop and analyze mathematical models of food systems Here food system refers to the entire set of activities by which calories and nutrients are grown harvested traded processed transported stored sold prepared and eventually

In the realm of statistics and economics, there are several important problems that can be described as stopping problems; a kind of decision problem where an actor must observe some

Linear dynamical systems (LDSs) are a class of time-series models widely used in robotics, finance, engineering, and meteorology. In it's general form (when state transition dynamics are unknown), learning LDS

This talk will be about symmetric designs. Symmetric designs are mathematical objects that include but are not limited to finite projective planes and difference sets. I will define symmetric designs,

A famous theorem of Roth states that for any $alpha > 0$ and $n$ sufficiently large in terms of $alpha$, any subset of ${1, dots, n}$ with density $alpha$ contains

The moving sofa problem is a well-known open problem in geometry. It asks for the planar shape of largest area that can be moved around a right-angled corner in a

K-means clustering aims to partition a set of n points into k clusters in such a way that each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean, and such

It's very common to have to analyze summations when working in combinatorics. Just as we would consult a computer when doing other routine tasks in mathematics, there are tools out

We consider zero-sum games in which one player (the Hider) hides k balls among n boxes and the other player (the Searcher) inspects the boxes one by one until finding

First, we'll talk about the total height statistic on a certain family of random graphs. We are able to get Maple to compute moments of this statistic. Taking limits, we

Given a (finite) graph G, there is a natural finite abelian group we can associate to G, called its Jacobian group. There are different sources of motivation for studying these

A martingale is a sequence of random variables that maintain their future expected value conditioned on the past. A $[0,1]$-bounded martingale is said to polarize if it converges in the

A (uniform) hypergraph is c-colorable if its vertices can be assigned colors from 1,...,c so that no hyperedge is monochromatic. A hypergraph is r-rainbow colorable (or r-polychromatic) if its vertices