| Dave Anderson |
| Sara Billey |
| Jonathan Browder |
| Ioana Dumitriu |
| Branko Grünbaum (Emeritus) |
| Chris Hoffman |
| Isabella Novik |
| Rekha Thomas |
| Henry Cohn |
| Monty McGovern |
| John Sullivan |
| David Wilson |
|
| Andrew Crites
(Ph.D. 2011) Joao Gouveia (Ph.D. 2011) Michael Goff (Ph.D. 2010) |
| Steve Klee (Ph.D. 2010) |
| Kurt Luoto (Ph.D. 2009) |
| Stephanie Vance(Ph.D. 2009) |
| Andrew Frohmader(Ph.D. 2008) |
| Tristram Bogart (Ph.D. 2007) |
| Anton Dochterman (Ph.D. 2007) |
| Brant Jones (Ph.D. 2007) |
| Matthew Kahle (Ph.D. 2007) |
| Beth Kelly(Ph.D. 2007) |
| Edwin O'Shea (Ph.D. 2006) |
| Chris Hanusa (Ph.D. 2005) |
| Combinatorics Seminar |
| Combinatorics Pre-Seminar |
| Computer Science Theory Seminar |
| Microsoft Theory Group Seminar |
Combinatorialists at UW
The department currently has a very active group in combinatorics with a long history of excellence in this field beginning with E.T.Bell. During the latter half of the 20th century, Branko Grünbaum and Victor Klee, played an important role in establishing the field of combinatorics through their seminal work on geometric combinatorics and the connections to computer science, operations research and pure mathematics. With the impending retirements of Grünbaum and Klee, in 1997 and 2000, the department placed a high priority in the late 90's on maintaining this strong reputation through selective hiring in algebraic, geometric, and probabalistic combinatorics. The department has now assembled an active group of young researchers in this field, consisting of professors Rekha Thomas (hired in 2000), Sara Billey (hired in 2002) and Isabella Novik (hired in 2004). Assistant Professor Ioana Dumitriu was appointed in 2006. Chris Hoffman started out in ergotic theory and has moved closer to probabalisitc combinatorics through his work with Yuval Peres at Microsoft. The combinatorics group is further bolstered by faculty in related areas including representation theory, algebraic geometry, optimization, probability, algebra, and our affiliate faculty in the Microsoft theory group with interests in combinatorics. We have a weekly seminar in combinatorics in addition to undergraduate and topics courses in this area every year. We regularly run a year long graduate course entitled "Foundations of Combinatorics" for students interested in the area.Billey's research interests lie in the intersection between combinatorics, algebraic geometry and Lie theory. The focus of her work is on Schubert varieties, Bruhat order, Weyl groups, root systems, and symmetric functions. Recent successes include a new approach to computing the Kostka numbers in symmetric function theory (with Guillemin and Rassart) and the study of a new family of varieties related to intersections of Schubert varieties index by higher dimensional analogs of permutation matrices (with Vakil), and characterization of smooth and rationally smooth Schubert varieties in affine Grassmannians (with Mitchell).
The research interests of Isabella Novik lie in combinatorics of simplicial complexes, and in connections between combinatorics, commutative algebra, and algebraic topology. Her work includes problems related to characterizing face numbers for various classes of simplicial complexes. Among recent achievements are new asymptotic results on the face numbers of centrally symmetric polytopes (joint with Nathan Linial and Alexander Barvinok) as well as new bounds on the face numbers and Betti numbers of simplicial manifolds (joint with Edward Swartz), including the proof of Kuhnel's 1995 conjecture for the maximum value of the Euler characteristic and Kalai's 1987 conjecture providing a lower bound on the number of edges.
Rekha Thomas works on problems that lie at the intersection of discrete optimization, computational algebra and geometry.
Chris Hoffman works at the intesection of combinatorics with discrete probability.
Ioana Dumitriu's research interests include random matrices, computing, and algorithmic game theory.
Dave Anderson is an NSF postdoctoral fellow. He works in algebraic geometry and combinatorics.