Combinatorics Seminar - Zilin Jiang

16:15-18:00

Speaker: Zilin Jiang

Title: Rainbow structures via topological methods

Abstract: Given a family of structures, is it possible to choose an element from each structure to form a new structure of the same kind? This new structure is poetically called rainbow because we can think of each given structure in a different color. Some long standing combinatorial problems, such as transversals in a Latin square and the Caccetta–Haggkvist conjecture, are rainbow in nature. In this talk, we will discuss a line of attacks to related problems via algebraic topology.