Bi-College Math Colloquium
Monday, April 25, 2022 - 4:00pm
Michael Dougherty
Swarthmore College
How can we model an ensemble of objects moving through a plane without colliding? What kind of motions are allowed when the objects are constrained to a graph instead? Is there a shape to the set of complex polynomials with distinct roots? Each of these questions can be understood and answered using a topological object known as a “configuration space”. In this talk, we will explore a few examples of these spaces and discuss their associated combinatorics and geometry.