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Department of Mathematics,
University of California San Diego

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Food For Thought Seminar

Adrian Duane

UCSD

Kepler Walls

Abstract:

In this talk, we introduce a new family of combinatorial objects called Kepler walls. Roughly speaking, a Kepler wall is a wall built of bricks in which no two bricks are adjacent, and each brick below the top row is supported by a brick in the row above. Despite their unlikely definition, Kepler walls of unrestricted width are counted by binomial coefficients, as we will see by means of a constructive bijection. We will also see connections to other interesting and well-understood sequences, such as the Catalan and Fibonacci numbers.

October 1, 2009

11:00 AM

AP&M 7321

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