EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: From Magic Squares to Polynomials
Speaker: Adam Boocher
Speaker Info: University of Utah
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

A magic square is an array of natural numbers whose rows and columns sum to a given number n. Magic squares have been studied for millennia, but only recently have some combinatorial questions been settled. In this talk, I'll describe how to count the number of magic squares with a given sum. We'll see that the right approach leads us naturally to systems of polynomial equations, and see that mathematical objects called syzygies are at the heart of this problem. We'll close with some tantalizing conjectures about syzygies of current interest.