Geometric and Topological Combinatorics

Date: 14 August - 15 December 2017

Location: MSRI

Combinatorics is one of the fastest growing areas in contemporary Mathematics, and much of this growth is due to the connections and interactions with other areas of Mathematics. This program is devoted to the very vibrant and active area of interaction between Combinatorics with Geometry and Topology. That is, we focus on (1) the study of the combinatorial properties or structure of geometric and topological objects and (2) the development of geometric and topological techniques to answer combinatorial problems.

Key examples of geometric objects with intricate combinatorial structure are point configurations and matroids, hyperplane and subspace arrangements, polytopes and polyhedra, lattices, convex bodies, and sphere packings. Examples of topology in action answering combinatorial challenges are the by now classical Lovász’s solution of the Kneser conjecture, which yielded functorial approaches to graph coloring, and the  more recent, extensive topological machinery leading to breakthroughs on Tverberg-type problems.

Professor Francisco Santos (Cantabria) has been appointed as a Clay Senior Scholar to participate in this program.