Events

David Galvin

University of Notre Dame
Colloquia

When

Date: Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Virtual through Zoom
David Galvin is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. Galvin's research is primarily in discrete mathematics and combinatorics, with a particular focus on structural and enumerative aspects of discrete structures such as graphs, Hypergraphs and homomorphism spaces. He also explores connections between discrete probability, statistical physics and theoretical computer science.

The Stirling numbers of the second kind, introduced in 1730, arise in many contexts—combinatorial, analytic, algebraic, probabilist… I’ll introduce these versatile numbers and describe some of their interpretations and applications. The standard combinatorial interpretation of the Stirling numbers involves set partitions, and this interpretation has a natural generalization to graphs. I’ll discuss an application of this generalization to a problem coming from the Weyl algebra (the algebra on alphabet $\{x, D\}$ with the single relation $Dx=xD+1$). This is joint work with J. Hilyardand J. Engbers.