The Mathematical Legacy Of Richard P Stanley

Richard Stanley's work in combinatorics revolutionized and reshaped the subject. His lectures, papers, and books inspired a generation of researchers. In this volume, these researchers explain how Stanley's vision and insights influenced and guided their own perspectives on the subject. As a valuable bonus, this book contains a collection of Stanley's short comments on each of his papers. This book may serve as an introduction to several different threads of ongoing research in combinatorics as well as giving historical perspective.

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Over the past 25 years, there has been an explosion of interest in the area of random tilings. The first book devoted to the topic, this timely text describes the mathematical theory of tilings. It starts from the most basic questions (which planar domains are tileable?), before discussing advanced topics about the local structure of very large random tessellations. The author explains each feature of random tilings of large domains, discussing several different points of view and leading on to open problems in the field. The book is based on upper-division courses taught to a variety of students but it also serves as a self-contained introduction to the subject. Test your understanding with the exercises provided and discover connections to a wide variety of research areas in mathematics, theoretical physics, and computer science, such as conformal invariance, determinantal point processes, Gibbs measures, high-dimensional random sampling, symmetric functions, and variational problems.

This volume consists of research papers and expository survey articles presented by the invited speakers of the Summer Workshop on Lattice Polytopes. Topics include enumerative, algebraic and geometric combinatorics on lattice polytopes, topological combinatorics, commutative algebra and toric varieties.Readers will find that this volume showcases current trends on lattice polytopes and stimulates further developments of many research areas surrounding this field. With the survey articles, research papers and open problems, this volume provides its fundamental materials for graduate students to learn and researchers to find exciting activities and avenues for further exploration on lattice polytopes.

A Dingo Ate My Math Book presents ingenious, unusual, and beautiful nuggets of mathematics with a distinctly Australian flavor. It focuses, for example, on Australians' love of sports and gambling, and on Melbourne's iconic, mathematically inspired architecture. Written in a playful and humorous style, the book offers mathematical entertainment as well as a glimpse of Australian culture for the mathematically curious of all ages. This collection of engaging stories was extracted from the Maths Masters column that ran from 2007 to 2014 in Australia's Age newspaper. The maths masters in question are Burkard Polster and Marty Ross, two (immigrant) Aussie mathematicians, who each week would write about math in the news, providing a new look at old favorites, mathematical history, quirks of school mathematics—whatever took their fancy. All articles were written for a very general audience, with the intention of being as inviting as possible and assuming a minimum of mathematical background.

The Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry is intended as a reference book fully accessible to nonspecialists as well as specialists, covering all major aspects of both fields. The book offers the most important results and methods in discrete and computational geometry to those who use them in their work, both in the academic world—as researchers in mathematics and computer science—and in the professional world—as practitioners in fields as diverse as operations research, molecular biology, and robotics. Discrete geometry has contributed significantly to the growth of discrete mathematics in recent years. This has been fueled partly by the advent of powerful computers and by the recent explosion of activity in the relatively young field of computational geometry. This synthesis between discrete and computational geometry lies at the heart of this Handbook. A growing list of application fields includes combinatorial optimization, computer-aided design, computer graphics, crystallography, data analysis, error-correcting codes, geographic information systems, motion planning, operations research, pattern recognition, robotics, solid modeling, and tomography.

Can we coexist with the other life forms that have evolved on this planet? Are there realistic alternatives to fossil fuels that would sustainably provide for human society's energy needs and have fewer harmful effects? How do we deal with threats such as emergent diseases? Mathematical models—equations of various sorts capturing relationships between variables involved in a complex situation—are fundamental for understanding the potential consequences of choices we make. Extracting insights from the vast amounts of data we are able to collect requires analysis methods and statistical reasoning. This book on elementary topics in mathematical modeling and data analysis is intended for an undergraduate “liberal arts mathematics”-type course but with a specific focus on environmental applications. It is suitable for introductory courses with no prerequisites beyond high school mathematics. A great variety of exercises extends the discussions of the main text to new situations and/or introduces new real-world examples. Every chapter ends with a section of problems, as well as with an extended chapter project which often involves substantial computing work either in spreadsheet software or in the R statistical package.

We describe a method, based on the theory of Macdonald–Koornwinder polynomials, for proving bounded Littlewood identities. Our approach provides an alternative to Macdonald’s partial fraction technique and results in the first examples of bounded Littlewood identities for Macdonald polynomials. These identities, which take the form of decomposition formulas for Macdonald polynomials of type (R, S) in terms of ordinary Macdonald polynomials, are q, t-analogues of known branching formulas for characters of the symplectic, orthogonal and special orthogonal groups. In the classical limit, our method implies that MacMahon’s famous ex-conjecture for the generating function of symmetric plane partitions in a box follows from the identification of GL(n, R), O(n) as a Gelfand pair. As further applications, we obtain combinatorial formulas for characters of affine Lie algebras; Rogers–Ramanujan identities for affine Lie algebras, complementing recent results of Griffin et al.; and quadratic transformation formulas for Kaneko–Macdonald-type basic hypergeometric series.

Divisors and Sandpiles provides an introduction to the combinatorial theory of chip-firing on finite graphs. Part 1 motivates the study of the discrete Laplacian by introducing the dollar game. The resulting theory of divisors on graphs runs in close parallel to the geometric theory of divisors on Riemann surfaces, and Part 1 culminates in a full exposition of the graph-theoretic Riemann-Roch theorem due to M. Baker and S. Norine. The text leverages the reader's understanding of the discrete story to provide a brief overview of the classical theory of Riemann surfaces. Part 2 focuses on sandpiles, which are toy models of physical systems with dynamics controlled by the discrete Laplacian of the underlying graph. The text provides a careful introduction to the sandpile group and the abelian sandpile model, leading ultimately to L. Levine's threshold density theorem for the fixed-energy sandpile Markov chain. In a precise sense, the theory of sandpiles is dual to the theory of divisors, and there are many beautiful connections between the first two parts of the book. Part 3 addresses various topics connecting the theory of chip-firing to other areas of mathematics, including the matrix-tree theorem, harmonic morphisms, parking functions, M-matrices, matroids, the Tutte polynomial, and simplicial homology. The text is suitable for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students.