UPDATE: EVENT CANCELLED. Unfortunately, due to changes in travel circumstances, this event is cancelled. We will try to reschedule Jed’s talk for a future date, most likely in the Fall.
On Monday, March 16th, Jed Yang from Bethel University will be giving a seminar talk entitled “Counting tilings with computers”, which should be of interest to both math and computer science students. An abstract for the talk can be found below. The talk will start at 3:30pm in Olin 321, with refreshments beginning at 3:15pm.
The department looks forward to seeing you there!
TITLE: Counting tilings with computers
How many ways can a region be tiled by a collection of tiles? This is a
hard computational question in general, but we can study specific simple
cases. For example, using dominoes, we can produce the familiar
Fibonacci numbers by counting tilings. How can we distinguish which
tiles are sufficiently interesting (mathematically) to warrant further
study? Perhaps computer software can help. In this talk, we will
approach tiling problems from both math and computer science
perspectives, discuss some ideas and tools from both fields, and
illustrate a role computer science can play in pure math research.
(Includes joint work with math and computer science undergraduate students.)