Conference on Bijective and Algebraic Combinatorics, March 24-25, 2014.

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This award will provide funds to support a two-day conference at the University of Florida during March 24-25, 2014. The basic objective of the conference is to bring together professors, post-docs, and graduate and undergraduate students working on both algebraic and bijective combinatorics. Algebraic combinatorics, that is, the application of algebraic tools to solve combinatorial problems, has been a very popular area of research in the last 25 years. Its most frequently used tools include generating functions, symmetric polynomials, Standard Young Tableaux, and the incidence algebra of a partially ordered set. These high-powered algebraic tools often show that some classes of remote-looking objects in fact have the same size. That is when bijective combinatorics comes in the picture. If two classes of objects that seem to be unrelated contain the same number of elements, then it is quite possible that those classes are not unrelated after all, and there is a bijection between them. These bijections are sometimes quite challenging to find, but once they are found, they enhance our understanding of the classes at hand.