Department of Mathematics
Title : A survey of matroid research
| Speaker: Dillon Mayhew Affiliation: Victoria University Time: 11:00 Monday, 6 May, 2013 Location: 303-412 |
Abstract
| If we imagine a race of intelligent beings living inside a computer, it seems likely they would discover modular arithmetic long before they discovered the real numbers. Therefore, their idea of geometry would be quite different from ours. They would coordinatize the plane with modular integers, rather than real numbers. Many geometric features that are familiar to us would be meaningless in their geometry. Specifically, the notion of 'betweeness' makes no sense when coordinates come from an unordered field. They would however, share our sense of geometric dependence: three points are dependent if they are collinear, four points are dependent if they are coplanar, and so on. Matroids are the mathematical objects that abstract geometric dependence, and are the natural tools to use when studying space, from the perspective of intelligent computers. This talk will contain an introduction to matroid theory, and a brief survey of current research. |
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Programmes and Centres
- New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (NZIMA)
- Community for Understanding and Learning in the Mathematical Sciences (CULMS)
- Centre for Mathematical Social Science (CMSS)
- Department of Computer Science
- Department of Engineering Science
- Department of Physics
- Department of Statistics
- Auckland Bioengineering Institute
