Student Combinatorics Seminar

We'll move from a formulation of matroids as combinatorial gadgets to working with square-free monomial ideals associated to matroids in polynomial rings. We proceed to venture and exposit a pithy common banner -- not unlike "millennials" -- for a rather vast class of ideals in polynomial rings that strictly includes these matroidal monomial ideals as a subclass. As time permits, we'll suggest the vastness of this class by expositing a key construction contained in the paper "Matroid Configurations and Symbolic Powers of their ideals" (Trans. AMS 2017) by Geramita -- Harbourne -- Migliore -- Nagel. This talk should ideally suffice as suitable preparation for my Combinatorics seminar talk on Friday 03/29/19, which will err on the side of speeding through a lot of the same material, kinda like the Precalculus review tour de force in Math 115. Speaker(s): Robert Walker (University of Michigan)