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 2024-2025 academic year are Nick Anderson, Pranjal Dangwal, Ryan Lynch, and Yuxuan Sun.
Seminar meets on Thursdays 4-5pm.
Abstracts for the talks can be found here.
Fall 2024
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 2024
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 Fridays from 3:35 pm – 4:25 pm in Vincent Hall 570, organized by Anna Weigandt and Shiyun Wang.