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University of California, Berkeley |
Topic: Tropical Mathematics
Abstract: In tropical arithmetic, the sum of two numbers is their maximum and the product of two numbers is their usual sum. Many results familiar from algebra and geometry, including the Quadratic Formula, the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, and Bézout's Theorem, continue to hold in the tropical world. In this lecture we learn how to draw tropical curves and why evolutionary biologists might care about this.
Bio: Bernd Sturmfels is Professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. A leading experimentalist among mathematicians, Sturmfels has authored ten books and 175 research articles in the areas of combinatorics, algebraic geometry, symbolic computation and their applications. He currently works on algebraic methods in optimization, statistics and the life sciences.
CONFERENCE SUPPORT: The Northern California Undergraduate Mathematics Conference is partially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and is administered through the Mathematical Association of America (through DMS-0536991).