Date

Location

Virtual - Zoom

Description

 

Western's Association for Mathematics (W\(\alpha\)M) is the undergraduate math club at Western. The Zoom link can be found on the department's Canvas page.

Speaker: Prof. Andrew Berget (WWU)

Title: Counting with cyclic symmetry

Abstract: I'll describe the cyclic sieving phenomenon, which gives a simple way to count objects with cyclic symmetry by evaluating a polynomial at various roots of unity. I'll illustrate the phenomenon with a student friendly example: The \(k\)-subsets of an \(n\)-set, the symmetry that sends 1-to-2, 2-to-3, ..., \(n\)-to-1, and a polynomial derived from Pascal's triangle called the \(q\)-binomial coefficient.