October 12 – 16, 2015

Monday, Oct. 12

No classes – Fall Break 

Tuesday, Oct. 13

No Classes – Fall Break 

Wednesday, Oct. 14

No Seminars

Thursday, Oct. 15

Chemistry Seminar: “Watching energy dance in plastic solar cells”
Dr. David Blank, University of Minnesota
3:00 p.m. refreshments, seminar will start at 3:15 p.m.

Friday, Oct. 16

MSCS Research SeminarThe combinatorics of q-analogues
Joel Lewis is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota.
Often, a combinatorial question involving permutations may be phrased naturally in terms of permutations matrices.  In this case, it is sometimes possible to phrase the same question in other contexts; in particular, for invertible matrices over a finite field having q elements.  In many situations, these two questions are related in the following very surprising way: the limit as q tends to 1 of the answer about matrices over finite fields is equal to the answer of the original question about permutations.  In this talk, I will discuss examples of this phenomenon of “q-analogues” that come from the part of combinatorics known as rook theory.  The only prerequisites for this talk are familiarity with linear algebra and the concept of a field.
3:30 p.m., RNS 204