Colloquium-Sandpiles and representation theory
Fri, 23 February, 2018
6:00pm
Title: Sandpiles and representation theory
Speaker: Victor Reiner, University of Minnesota
http://www-users.math.umn.edu/
Date and Time: Friday, Feb. 23 1:00-2:00pm
Place: Rome 204
Abstract : The sandpile group of a connected graph is an interesting and subtle invariant: a finite abelian group whose size is the number of spanning trees in the graph. After reviewing these sandpile groups, we will introduce an analogous "sandpile group" for any representation of a finite group, partly motivated by the classical McKay correspondence. Time permitting, we will discuss the generalization to representations of finite-dimensional Hopf algebras.
(Joint work with Georgia Benkart, Carly Klivans, Christian Gaetz, Darij Grinberg, and Jia Huang.)
Bio: Victor Reiner is a Distinguished McKnight Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. He earned his A.B. in Mathematics from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Richard Stanley. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a member in the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. He is the author of over 100 publications on combinatorics and its connections with fields such as algebra, geometry, and topology. He has served as advisor to numerous students and postdoctoral researchers. He is interim Editor-in-Chief at the newly founded journal Algebraic Combinatorics, and has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the editorial boards of several other journals. He was recently elected as a Member-at-Large of the American Mathematical Society Council.