Date & Time: Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 17:15-18:15.
Venue::Main Auditorium, VMCC
Title:Trees in Various Sciences
Speaker: Prof. Xavier G Viennot,Emeritus Researcher Director, CNRS, University of Bordeaux, France
Abstract: Trees occur in every part of computer science. More generally, tree-like structures appear in various sciences: river networks in hydrogeology, ARN molecules in biology, fractal structures in physics and so on. Some parameters defined on trees related to some optimization problems in computer science can be found in the morphological study of river networks and also in molecular biology. The speaker will explain these amazing coincidences by exhibiting mathematical correspondences at the combinatorial level of the trees. Videos with violinis will illustrate these correspondences.
The "Mathematics of Trees" also appear in some recent research in theoretical physics, called Quantum Gravity, in the understanding of the structure of our "space-time" universe, together with quantum mechanics and in the comprehension of the elementary particle of light.
About the Speaker: Prof. Xavier Viennot is an Emeritus researcher director at CNRS, LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, France. Prof. Viennot received his Ph.D. From University of Paris in 1971 and got a Doctoral thesis (these d'Etat) in 1974 at University Paris, under the direction of M.P.Schutzenberger, pioneer in France for the birth of theoretical computer science and the renaissance of combinatorics. His research interest are in enumerative, algebraic and bijective combinatorics, in interaction with other parts of mathematics, computer science and theoretical physics. Professor Viennot is a recipient of the silver medal of CNRS. He has written two books and about one hundred papers, in mathematical, computer science and physics journals.