Seminar Details

For most of its existence, a hallmark of permutation patterns research has been the use of computers. Our research is regularly made possible by the ability to write a simple script to generate permutations with some certain property, helping us to discover an interesting theorem; or to open up Sage, or Maple, or Mathematica and perform some large generating function calculation; or to use one of the several existing large permutation patterns software libraries to test some intriguing conjectures.

The quest to understand permutation classes has led to the import of computational methods from other areas into the field of permutation patterns, as well as the development of a number of new techniques. Some of these methods produce rigorous results, assuming the correctness of the software implementation. Others are experimental in the sense that their output should be considered conjectural. The popularity of permutation patterns has even led to some of these computational techniques making the jump to other areas of combinatorics. This talk will survey a collection of these methods, including some developed by myself and my collaborators.