UMN Student Combinatorics & Algebra Seminar

The Student Combinatorics & Algebra Seminar (SCAS) at the University of Minnesota is a student-run seminar that hosts talks within the fields of combinatorics and algebra, aimed at early graduate students.

Organizers for the 2025-2026 academic year are Isidora Bailly-Hall, Judy Chiang, and Annika Gonzalez-Zugasti.

Seminar meets on Wednesdays 4:40-5:40pm in Vincent Hall 570.

Abstracts for the talks can be found here.

Related Seminars and Events

UMN Combinatorics Seminar

Organized by Shiyun Wang and Anna Weigandt - Thursdays 10:10-11:00am

Commutative Algebra & Algebraic Geometry Seminar

Organized by David Favero and Christine Berkesch - Thursdays 1:25-2:20 pm

ALGECOM XXVI

Ohio State University - Saturday, 8 November 2025

SCAS Schedules

Fall 2025

In Fall 2025 the seminar is organized by Isidora Bailly-Hall, Judy Chiang, and Annika Gonzalez-Zugasti. If you're interested in giving a talk this semester, email the organizers and let us know!

September 3: Daniel Erman (University of Hawaii). Pretalk to UMN CAAG Seminar (Sept 4 & 11). Title: Why care about syzygies and derived categories?
September 10: ⚡Lightning Talks⚡by Robbie Angarone, Judy Chiang, Joe McDonough, Anastasia Nathanson, and Kaelyn Willingham (UMN).
September 17: Annika Gonzalez-Zugasti (UMN). Title: Labeled Chip-firing on Star Graphs.
September 24: Zachary Hamaker (University of Florida). Pretalk to UMN Combinatorics Seminar (September 25). Title: Shifted combinatorics.
October 1: Torin Greenwood (North Dakota State University). Pretalk to UMN Combinatorics Seminar (October 2). Title: Analyzing sequences with analytic combinatorics.
October 8: Robbie Angarone (UMN). Pretalk to UMN Combinatorics Seminar (October 8). Title TBD.
October 15: Joe McDonough (UMN). Title TBD.
October 22: Andy Berget (Western Washington University). Pretalk to UMN Combinatorics Seminar (October 23). Title TBD.
October 29: Boyana Martinova (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Pretalk for UMN CAAG Seminar (October 30). Title TBD.
November 5: Dorian Smith (UMN). Title TBD
November 12: Michael Tang (University of Washington). Title TBD.
November 19: Mitsuki Hanada (UC Berkeley). Pretalk for UMN Combinatorics Seminar (November 20). Title TBD.
November 26: 🥧 Thanksgiving 🥧 - No Seminar! 🦃
December 3: Anastasia Nathanson (UMN). Title TBD
December 10: 𓃰 White Elephant Talk Exchange 𓃰

Spring 2025

In 2024-2025, the seminar was organized by Nick Anderson, Pranjal Dangwal, Ryan Lynch, and Yuxuan Sun.

January 23: Pouya Layeghi (UMN), "Categorical Reiner-Stamate Equivalence Relations"
January 30: Son Nguyen (MIT), "Crystal operators"
February 6: Patty Commins (UMN), "The space of phylogenetic trees and an associated semigroup"
February 13: Suki Dasher (UMN), "R-polynomials from Solvable Lattice Models"
February 20: Nick Anderson (UMN), "Minimal matchings for Gr(k,n) via height functions"
February 27: Dylan Snustad (UMN), "The Unreasonable Mathematical Beauty of Chip-firing"
March 6: Jiyang (Johnny) Gao (Harvard), "A tale of three matroids"
March 13: No seminar - Spring Break! 🌸
March 20: SCAS tea!
March 27: Annika Gonzalez-Zugasti (UMN), "An Introduction to Knot Theory"
April 3: SCAS tea and informal symposium!
April 10: Katie Waddle (University of Michigan), "Coxeter-Conway frieze patterns and the Cayley-Menger determinant"
April 17: Pranjal Dangwal (UMN), "Cup product, intersections, and Schubert calculus"
May 1: Kevin Piterman (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), "On the homotopy type of posets"

Fall 2024

In 2024-2025, the seminar was organized by Nick Anderson, Pranjal Dangwal, Ryan Lynch, and Yuxuan Sun.

September 12: ⚡️Lightning Talks⚡ by Joe McDonough, Robbie Angarone, Carolyn Stephen, Trevor Karn, Dylan Snustad, Kaelyn Willingham, and Judy Chiang.
September 19: Amanda Burcroff (Harvard), "Cluster Algebras and Scattering Diagrams: A Rank Two Haiku"
September 26: Mykola Sapronov (UMN), "Combinatorics of Toric Mirror Symmetry and Locally Free Resolutions"
October 3: Cesar Zapata (UMN), "Complexity between K_j and K_i"
October 10: Scott Neville (University of Michigan), "Acyclic quivers and admissible quasi-Cartan companions"
October 17: Portia Anderson (Cornell), "An introduction to Schubert calculus and puzzles"
October 24: Robbie Angarone (UMN), "A tale of two hierarchies: 'Nice' number sequences and representations"
October 31: Qiyue Chen (UMN), "Quiver representations: before and after cluster algebra"
November 7: Joe McDonough (UMN), "The Stanley-Stembridge conjecture for 2+1+1 avoiding unit interval orders"
November 14: Trevor Karn (UMN), "Poincaré Polynomials and Invariant Theory"
November 21: Miranda Moore (UMN), "Twists, higher dimer covers, and web duality"
November 28: No seminar - Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃
December 5: 🐘❓🎁 White Elephant Talk Exchange 🎁❓🐘

Spring 2024

In 2023-2024, the seminar was organized by Joe McDonough, Miranda Moore, and Sylvester Zhang.

January 18: No seminar
January 25: Sylvester Zhang (UMN), "Local perspectives of the Robinson-Schensted Correspondence"
February 1: Joe McDonough (UMN), "Walking the faces of the Kunz fan"
February 8: Son Nguyen (UMN), "Growth Diagram for Schubert RSK"
February 15: Colin Defant (Harvard), "Posets, Coxeter Groups, Root Systems, etc."
February 22: Kaelyn Willingham (UMN), "Tropical Matrices and the Connection to Graph Theory"
February 29: Elise Catania (UMN), "A 🍩Toric🍩 Analogue for Greene's Rational Function of a Poset"
March 7: No seminar - Spring break 🌸
March 14: Tara Gomes (UMN), "Numerical semigroups and a handy model for free resolutions"
March 21: Mykola Sapronov (UMN), "Homotopy Path Algebras"
March 28: Dorian Smith (UMN), "On the Lucky and Displacement Statistics of Stirling Permutations"
April 4: No seminar
April 11: Sylvester Zhang (UMN), "The Greene-Kleitman Duality"
April 18: Pranjal Dangwal (UMN), "Poset topology and algebras"
April 25: (Different location: Murphy 130) 🐘❓🎁 Faculty White Elephant Talk Exchange 🎁❓🐘

Fall 2023

In 2023-2024, the seminar was organized by Joe McDonough, Miranda Moore, and Sylvester Zhang.

September 7: No seminar
September 14: ⚡️Lightning Talks⚡️ by Robbie Angarone, Anastasia Nathanson, Mahrud Sayrafi, Carolyn Stephen, Kaelyn Willingham, and Kayla Wright
September 21: Pouya Layeghi (UMN), "Homotopy Path Algebras and Koszulity"
September 28: Yuxuan Sun (UMN), "Crystal Chute Moves on Pipe Dreams"
October 5: Lilly Webster (UMN), "A Brief Introduction to Cluster Algebras"
October 12: Jesse Kim (UCSD), "Combinatorial spiders and their webs"
October 19: Robbie Angarone (UMN), "Totally nonnegative matrices and real-rooted polynomials in combinatorics"
October 26: Suki Dasher (UMN), "An Introduction to Lie (Super)algebras, Quantum Groups, and Combinatorial Representation Theory"
November 2: Emily Gullerud (UMN), "Simplicial complexes for group cohomology"
November 9: Anastasia Nathanson (UMN), "Matroids, posets, and their simplicial complexes"
November 16: Kayla Wright (UMN), "Path Algebras and Module Categories"
November 23: No seminar - Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃
November 30: No seminar
December 7: 🐘❓🎁 White Elephant Talk Exchange 🎁❓🐘

Spring 2023

In 2022-2023, the seminar was organized by Elise Catania, Tara Gomes, Anastasia Nathanson, and Kaelyn Willingham.

January 26: Theo Douvroupoulos (University of Massachusets, Amherst) "Recursions and Proofs in Coxeter-Catalan combinatorics: A précis"
February 2: Anastasia Nathanson (University of Minnesota) "Permutation action on the Chow ring of a matroid: a bande d'annonce"
February 9: Leonid Rybnikov (Harvard) "Spatial Polygons and Representations of SL(2)"
February 16: Trevor Karn (University of Minnesota) "Combinatorial formulas for paving matroid Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomials: à l’envers"
February 23: Moriah Elkin (University of Minnesota) "Twists of Grassmannian Cluster Variables: présentation indépendante"
March 2: Sean Griffin (UC Davis) "Springer fibers: avec tableaux"
March 9: Spring Break
March 16: Mahrud Sayrafi (University of Minnesota) "The Polytope, the Toric Variety, and the Line Bundle: un conte fan-tastique"
March 23: Yibo Gao (University of Michigan) "Establishing the Sperner property of partially ordered sets"
March 30: Sheila Sundaram (Pierrepont School) "Homotopy and Homology of order complexes of posets"
April 6: Dorian Smith (University of Minnesota) "Sandpile Groups of Cones Over Trees"
April 13: Tianyuan Xu (Haverford College) "Fully commutative Kazhdan–Lustig cells"
April 20: Son Nguyen (University of Minnesota) "Bender-Knuth Involutions on Linear Extensions of Posets: groupe de cactus"
April 27: Professor Talk Exchange featuring Michelle Chu, Tyler Lawson, Pasha Pylyavskyy, Vic Reiner, and Peter Webb

Fall 2022

In 2022-2023, the seminar was organized by Elise Catania, Tara Gomes, Anastasia Nathanson, and Kaelyn Willingham.

September 15: Lightning Talks by Robbie Angarone, Patty Commins, Trevor Karn, Sasha Pevzner, Mahrud Sayrafi, Kayla Wright, & Sylvester Zhang
September 22: Sylvester Zhang (University of Minnesota), "Expansion Formulas for Surface Cluster Algebras"
September 29: Kaelyn Willingham (University of Minnesota), "How Deep Learning Algorithms can help answer Combinatorial Questions"
October 6: Marta Pavelka (University of Miami), "Topology and Geometry in Combinatorics"
October 13: Katie Bruegge (University of Kentucky), "Lattice Polytopes and their Properties"
October 20: Harper Niergarth (University of Minnesota), "Spectral Faux Trees"
October 27: Patty Commins (University of Minnesota), "Group Actions on Partially Ordered Sets"
November 3: Kayla Wright (University of Minnesota), "What the Hecc is a Cluster Algebra?"
November 10: Carolyn Stephen (University of Minnesota) "Cluster Algebras and Root Systems"
November 17: Stephen Lacina (University of Oregon) "Lexicographic Shellability of Posets"
November 24: thankful for our speakers 🦃🍁👨‍👨‍👦‍👦
December 1: Lina Liu (University of Minnesota)
December 8: White Elephant Talk Exchange featuring Robbie Angarone, David DeMark, Moriah Elkin, Trevor Karn, Aaron Li, Joe McDonough, Riley O'Neill, Carolyn Stephen, and Lilly Webster

This seminar runs in tandem with the Combinatorics Seminar, which meets Thursdays from 10:10 am – 11:00 am in Vincent Hall 570 and is organized by Anna Weigandt and Shiyun Wang, and the Commutative Algebra & Algebraic Geomatry Seminar, which meets Thursdays from 1:25 pm - 2:20 pm in Vincent Hall 570 and is organized by David Favero and Christine Berkesch.

Page updated

Report abuse