Date & Time: Wednesday, 6th February, 2013 at 14:00 hrs.

Venue: Ramanujan Hall

Title: A Short Course on Combinatorics and Physics: The Cellular Ansatz

Speaker: Prof. Xavier G. Viennot, CNRS-LaBRI at the University of Bordeaux, France

Abstract: Professor Viennot will deliver a course of 12 lectures (of the duration of 1 hour and 30 minutes each) during January 7 - February 16, 2013 in the Department of Mathematics, IIT Bombay. The first lecture was scheduled on Monday, 7th January 2013 at 3.30 PM in Ramanujan Hall. The timings of subsequent lectures will be decided at the end of this lecture.

A brief description of the course supplied by Prof. Viennot appears below.

Course Outline:

The course will be somewhat similar to the course at Talca, Chile, of which the slides are available at:

http://www.xavierviennot.org/cours/cours/Courses_Chile.html

Course at IIT Bombay

The lectures that are planned at IIT Bombay will be covered by:

Ch3 about Young tableaux and RSK Ch4 about alternative tableaux and the PASEP algebra in physics Ch5 about a summary of the combinatorial theory of orthogonal polynomials (necessary for the next chapters of the classes) Ch6 (may be if time) about TASEP algebra," taquin game" for trees, Catalan tableaux and Loday-Ronco algebra Ch7 the general theory of the "Cellular Ansatz", with examples and applications.

The main part of the classes I plan to give , in more details can be found in the following "petite école" de combinatoire, I gave in Bordeaux, for our research group in LaBRI: page "petite école" of my main website: http://www.xavierviennot.org/xgv/petite_ecole.html "L'Ansatz cellulaire", année 2011. The summary and the title of the chapters are in french, but the slides of 15 lectures (PEC1, ... PEC15) are almost all in english. These series of slides will be more or less the slides for the classes in IIT. They cover Ch3, 4, 5 and 7 of the Talca courses, with more details.

Although these classes will present a new theory, I called "cellular Ansatz", I have been working on these last years, the level will be for non-specialist, and more than half of the classes, will present classical material such as RSK, normal ordering of operators in physics, combinatorics of orthogonal polynomials, dimers tilings, non-crossing paths or alternating sign matrices, ..... Thus it can be followed by students, professors and researchers.

About the Speaker:Prof. Viennot is one of the leading combinatorialists in the world and is widely known for his lively lectures. Students and faculty, especially those interested in combinatorics, are encouraged to attend. Further details about Prof. Viennot can be found at: http://www.xavierviennot.org/