Geometry and complexity of partition bijections

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, February 26, 2009 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Igor Pak – University of Minnesota
Organizer
Guillermo Goldsztein
The study of partition identities has a long history going back to Euler, with applications ranging from Analysis to Number Theory, from Enumerative Combina- torics to Probability. Partition bijections is a combinatorial approach which often gives the shortest and the most elegant proofs of these identities. These bijections are then often used to generalize the identities, find "hidden symmetries", etc. In the talk I will present a modern approach to partition bijections based on the geometry of random partitions and complexity ideas.