University of Victoria

A phase transition is a phenomenon in physics, chemistry, and other related fields where the macroscopic behavior of a system changes qualitatively when the tuning parameter (such as temperature) that governs local interactions is varied by a small...

Combinatorial Configurations lay between block designs and hypergraphs. When these incidence structures can be embedded in the plane, we call them Geometric Configurations. In this talk, we will explore several results in the study of configurations...

This seminar will focus on aspects of the ecology of animal home ranges in which empirically derived movement tracks are viewed as realizations of continuous time, continuous space stochastic processes. Topics will include the distinctions between...

Depth and width parameters of graphs, e.g., tree-width, path-width and tree-depth, play a crucial role in algorithmic and structural graph theory. These notions are of fundamental importance in the theory of graph minors, fixed parameter complexity...

An highly active research area is concerned with finding conditions on sparse sets that ensure the existence of many geometric patterns. I will present some results in this direction connecting Newhouse thickness and its generalizations to higher...

The field of DNA Topology includes the study of DNA geometry (supercoiling) and topology (knots and links) and their effects on DNA in vitro and in vivo. Statistical mechanics-based polygonal models of DNA have proved useful for addressing many...

This alternative math education event will present fun activities to explore math and computer science concepts to children (and adults!) using games and art! Lots of hands-on activities including: Sorting network An impossible balancing act...

I will discuss a problem that appeared on MathOverflow and its solution by the user “Fedja”. The result we will demonstrate is that if T is subset of the reals with Hausdorff dimension exceeding ½, then there is a positive probability that a standard...

A classical problem in combinatorial geometry, posed by Erdős in 1946, asks to determine the maximum number of unit segments in a set of n points in the plane. Since then a great variety of extremal problems in finite planar point sets have been...

In this talk, we consider a notion of stability for solutions of random optimization problems based on small perturbations of the input data and inspired by the technique for proving CLT using Stein's method as illustrated with examples by Chatterjee...