Prof. Mark Wildon visited Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology for six weeks in October and November 2022 to work with Prof. Liron Speyer on problems in the representation theory of the symmetric group. The visit was sponsored by the OIST Theoretical Sciences Visiting Program.
Prof. Wildon said 'OIST was an excellent place to concentrate on my mathematical research. I enjoyed my visit and will especially remember the many interesting conversation I had with the postgraduate students and postdocs at OIST.' The members of Prof. Speyer's group include Prof. Wildon's former Ph.D. student Eoghan McDowell, who graduated from Royal Holloway in June 2021.
Early in his visit, Prof. Wildon gave a general interest talk 'Primes, partitions and power series'. It may be watched on Youtube. Readers in a hurry might skip to 21:00 for the demonstration, by juggling tricks, of what algebraists mean by the word 'isomorphic'.
Prof. Wildon followed up the visit to OIST with two weeks at National University of Singapore. He gave the opening talk at the conference Representation theory, combinatorics and geometry, and worked with his collaborator Kay Jin Lim on an intriguing problem on subalgebras of the symmetric group with connections to card-shuffling and random walks.
