The Mathematics & Statistics Graduate Student Seminar: Combinatorial Geometry

The Mathematics & Statistics Graduate Student Seminar will convene again this week at 1:00pm on Friday, March 1, in the Main Lounge (Burnside 1025). As usual, there will be pizza.

This week, James Rickards will talk about combinatorial geometry:

In classical Euclidean geometry, there are a lot of facts and techniques needed to solve problems: incentres, excentres, tangent lines, concurrency theorems, etc. However, to solve combinatorial geometry problems, one typically needs only a very small geometric insight: for example the triangle inequality, or the area of a triangle. The main and most difficult ingredient in proofs is the combinatorial insight required. In this talk, I will go through some very useful techniques, apply them to several interesting examples, and mention a few open problems in the area. Bonus points if you can figure out the four problems (and their solutions!) in the talk picture (the colours are important).

See you all there!

All graduate students are invited. As with all talks in the graduate student seminar, this talk will be accessible to all graduate students in math and stats. This seminar was made possible by funding from the McGill Mathematics and Statistics Department and PGSS.