Mathematics that counts

Counting is a human activity that is at least 35000 years old. Today, the mathematics of selecting, arranging and counting collections of objects is called combinatorics. Though interesting nontrivial examples occur already in the I Ching (~1100 BC), serious attemps to study systematically combinatorial problems do not appear before the middle of the 17th century. In fact, somewhat surprisingly, combinatorics has not even been considered a respectable mathematical discipline (like say algebra or geometry) until the second half of the 20th century. In its half century of contemporary history, combinatorics flourished into one of the most thrilling area of mathematical research, finding important applications into virtually any field of pure and applied mathematics, as well as other sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, computer science and economy. In this lecture we present a quick (and biased) overview of the tale of how and why the cinderella of mathematics (cit.) got finally invited to the royal ball.

Short bio

Michele D'Adderio is Chargé de cours at Université Libre de Bruxelles since 2012. He received his PhD in 2010 at University of California (San Diego), under the guidance of the Fields medalist Zelmanov, and after that he was postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn and at the Mathematisches Institut in Gottingen. His research interests are broad and lye in the contexts of algebra, combinatorics and topology, focusing especially in their mutual interplay. His contributions, covering different topics such as geometric theory for associative algebras, matroid theory, toric arrangements, symmetric functions, appeared in top-class journals such as Advances in Mathematics and Transactions of the AMS and have been presented in the main conferences on the subject, such as the FPSAC. At his young age, he already mentored two PhD students. A volume of the prestigious collection Memoirs of the AMS will be devoted to his work (together with his students) on the Delta conjecture and the related algebro-combinatorial structures

The visit of Michele D'Adderio is organised in collaboration with Jacopo Gandini from the Department of Mathematics.