This week, on Friday Apr. 1st at 4pm in room 245 of Altgeld Hall, we'll be joined by Dr. Vesna Stojanoska! Dr. Stojanoska is an associate professor here at UIUC doing research in homotopy theory and some of its applications, and has managed an IGL project on the same topic for the past three semesters. On Friday, she'll be here to talk about a connection from partitions of natural numbers to structures in algebraic topology:
Take a natural number n, and look at all possible ways to break up the numbers from 1 to n into several groups. These are called partitions. Two partitions are linked if one can be obtained from the other by breaking up some groups.
Three partitions are linked if one is obtained from the other by breaking up, and the third is obtained by breaking up further. Similarly, we can define when any number of partitions are linked. Studying these linkage properties gives rise to a shape associated to the number n, whose symmetries know about deep structures in algebraic topology.
As usual, there will be free pizza courtesy of the IGL! Hope to see you there!
