Scientific

There have been several recent outbreaks of cholera (for example, in Haiti and Yemen), which is a bacterial disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. It can be transmitted to humans directly by person-to-person contact or indirectly via contaminated water. Random mixing cholera models from the literature are first formulated and briefly analyzed. Heterogeneities in person-to-person contact are introduced, by means of a multigroup model, and then by means of a contact network model. Utilizing an interplay of analysis and linear algebra, various control strategies for cholera are suggested by these models.

Pauline van den Driessche is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on aspects of stability in biological models and matrix analysis. Current research projects include disease transmission models that are appropriate for influenza, cholera and Zika. Most models include control strategies (e.g., vaccination for influenza) and aim to address questions relevant for public health. Sign pattern matrices occur in these models, and the possible inertias of such patterns is a current interest.

In a reconfiguration problem, the goal is to change an initial configuration of some structure to a final configuration using some limited set of moves. Examples include: sorting a list by swapping pairs of adjacent elements; finding the edit distance between two strings; or solving a Rubik’s cube in a minimum number of moves. Central questions are: Is reconfiguration possible? How many moves are required?

In this talk I will survey some reconfiguration problems, and then discuss the case of triangulations of a point set in the plane. A move in this case is a flip that replaces one edge by the opposite edge of its surrounding quadrilateral when that quadrilateral is convex. In joint work with Zuzana Masárová and Uli Wagner we characterize when one edge-labelled triangulation can be reconfigured to another via flips. The proof involves combinatorics, geometry, and topology.

Anna Lubiw is a professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. She has a PhD from the University of Toronto (1986) and a Master of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo (1983).

Her research is in the areas of Computational Geometry, Graph Drawing and Graph Algorithms. She was named the Ross and Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellow in 2014, received the University of Waterloo outstanding performance award in 2012 and was named a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2009. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Computational Geometry and the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications.

The intersection of graph searching and probabilistic methods is a new topic within graph theory, with applications to graph searching problems such as the game of Cops and Robbers and its many variants, Firefighting, graph burning, and acquaintance time. Graph searching games may be played on random structures such as binomial random graphs, random regular graphs or random geometric graphs. Probabilistic methods may also be used to understand the properties of games played on deterministic structures. A third and new approach is where randomness figures into the rules of the game, such as in the game of Zombies and Survivors. We give a broad survey of graph searching and probabilistic methods, highlighting the themes and trends in this emerging area. The talk is based on my upcoming book (with the same title) co-authored with Pawel Pralat (to be published by CRC Press in late 2017).

The study of maps, that is of graphs embedded in surfaces, is a popular subject that has implications in many branches of mathematics, the most famous aspects being purely graph-theoretical, such as the four-color theorem. The study of random maps has met an increasing interest in the recent years. This is motivated in particular by problems in theoretical physics, in which random maps serve as discrete models of random continuum surfaces. The probabilistic interpretation of bijective counting methods for maps happen to be particularly fruitful, and relates random maps to other important combinatorial random structures like the continuum random tree and the Brownian snake. This course will survey these aspects and present recent developments in this area.

We will introduce the Dynamical Mordell-Lang problem by Ghioca and Tucker.

After that, we explain the “orbit intersection problem” for linear spaces and semi-abelian varieties. This is joint work with Ghioca.