Bi-College Math Colloquium
Monday, March 25, 2019 - 4:00pm
Zvezdelina Stankova (BMC '93)
University of California, Berkeley
Whether designing the new tile pattern in your family's kitchen backsplash, trying to avoid bad investment sequences, or simply counting all possible paths from your home to school that do not cross over the local river, inescapably you are venturing into the realm of restricted patterns. In this talk, we shall discuss several paths of pattern-exploration, and think about whether or not there is a "true" way of approaching pattern-avoidance equivalence and ordering among the array of generated ideas and methods. No matter what your math background is, you will find your own path between realistic visualization and abstract thinking, and perhaps, you will fall in love with one of our open problems. Of course, the more math you know, the more adventurous you may feel about attacking these open problems. The speaker was an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College when she was one of the first to work on the topic of Restricted Patterns. Since then, the topic has grown to involve mathematicians from around the world and an annual international conference.