- Series
- Atlanta Combinatorics Colloquium
- Time
- Tuesday, September 10, 2024 - 4:30pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 005
- Speaker
- Igor Pak – UCLA and IAS – pak@math.ucla.edu – https://www.math.ucla.edu/~pak/
- Organizer
- Tom Kelly
Please Note: There will be refreshments beforehand beginning at 3pm.
In enumerative combinatorics, one is often asked to count the number of combinatorial objects. But the inverse problem is even more interesting: given some numbers, do they have a combinatorial interpretation? In the main part of the talk I will give a broad survey of this problem, formalize the question in the language of computational complexity, and describe some connections to deep results and open problems in algebraic and probabilistic combinatorics. In the last part of the talk, I will discuss our recent results on the defect and equality cases of Stanley inequalities for the numbers of bases of matroids and for the numbers of linear extensions of posets (joint work with Swee Hong Chan). The talk is aimed at the general audience.