Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Pursuit games---motivated historically by military tactics---are a natural for graphical settings, and take many forms. We will present some recent results involving (among other things) drunks, Kakeya sets and a "ketchup graph.'' Lastly, we describe what we think is the most important open problem in the field.

Matrices are one of the most fundamental structures in mathematics, and it is well known that the behavior of a matrix is dictated by its eigenvalues. Eigenvalues, however, are notoriously hard to control, due in part to the lack of techniques available. In this talk, I will present a new technique that we call the "method of interlacing polynomials" which has been used recently to give unprecedented bounds on eigenvalues, and as a result, new insight into a number of old problems. I will discuss some of these recent breakthroughs, which include the existence of Ramanujan graphs of all degrees, a resolution to the famous Kadison-Singer problem, and most recently an incredible result of Anari and Gharan that has led to an interesting new anomaly in computer science. This talk will be directed at a general mathematics audience and represents joint work with Dan Spielman and Nikhil Srivastava.

We are going to discuss a generalization of the classical relation between Jacobi matrices and orthogonal polynomials to the case of difference operators on lattices. More precisely, the difference operators in question reflect the interaction of nearest neighbors on the lattice Z^2. It should be stressed that the generalization is not obvious and straightforward since, unlike the classical case of Jacobi matrices, it is not clear whether the eigenvalue problem for a difference equation on Z^2 has a solution and, especially, whether the entries of an eigenvector can be chosen to be polynomials in the spectral variable. In order to overcome the above-mentioned problem, we construct difference operators on Z^2 using multiple orthogonal polynomials. In our case, it turns out that the existence of a polynomial solution to the eigenvalue problem can be guaranteed if the coefficients of the difference operators satisfy a certain discrete zero curvature condition. In turn, this means that there is a discrete integrable system behind the scene and the discrete integrable system can be thought of as a generalization of what is known as the discrete time Toda equation, which appeared for the first time as the Frobenius identity for the elements of the Pade table.

Catalan numbers arise in many enumerative contexts as the counting sequence of combinatorial structures. We consider natural local moves on some realizations of the Catalan sequence and derive estimates of the mixing time of the corresponding Markov chains. We present a new O(n^2 log n) bound on the mixing time for the random transposition chain on Dyck paths, and raise several open problems, including the optimality of the above bound. (Joint work with Prasad Tetali and Damir Yelliusizov.)