Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In the study of combinatorial aspects of symmetric groups, a major problem arising from applications to Genetics consists in finding a minimum factorization of any permutation with factors from a given generating set. The difficulty in developing an adequate theory as well as the hardness of the computational complexity may heavily vary depending on the generator set. In this talk, the generating set consists of all block transpositions introduced by Bafna and Pevzner in 1998 for the study of a particular ''genome rearrangement problem''. Results, open problems, and generalizations are discussed in terms of Cayley graphs and their automorphism groups.

The Jacobian group Jac(G) of a finite graph G is a group whose cardinality is the number of spanning trees of G. G also has a tropical Jacobian which has the structure of a real torus; using the notion of break divisors, one can obtain a polyhedral decomposition of the tropical Jacobian where vertices and cells correspond to the elements of Jac(G) and the spanning trees of G respectively. In this talk I will give a combinatorial description to bijections coming from this geometric setting, I will also show some previously known bijections can be related to these geometric bijections. This is joint work with Matthew Baker.

In 2010, Guth and Katz proved that if a collection of N lines in R^3 contained more than N^{3/2} 2-rich points, then many of these lines must lie on planes or reguli. I will discuss some generalizations of this result to space curves in three dimensional vector spaces. This is joint work with Larry Guth.

A fourientation of a graph is a choice for each edge of whether to orient it in either direction, bidirect it, or leave it unoriented. I will present joint work with Sam Hopkins where we describe classes of fourientations defined by properties of cuts and cycles whose cardinalities are given by generalized Tutte polynomial evaluations of the form: (k+l)^{n-1}(k+m)^g T (\frac{\alpha k + \beta l +m}{k+l}, \frac{\gamma k +l + \delta m}{k+m}) for \alpha,\gamma \in {0,1,2} and \beta, \delta \in {0,1}. We also investigate classes of 4-edge colorings defined via generalized notions of internal and external activity, and we show that their enumerations agree with those of the fourientation classes. We put forth the problem of finding a bijection between fourientations and 4-edge-colorings which respects all of the given classes. Our work unifies and extends earlier results for fourientations due to myself, Gessel and Sagan, and Hopkins and Perkinson, as well as classical results for full orientations due to Stanley, Las Vergnas, Greene and Zaslavsky, Gioan, Bernardi and others.