Serving Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia

Abstract for James Sellers' Talk

Title:  Research in Integer Partitions:  Alive and Well

Abstract:   Since my early days of graduate school, I have been fascinated by integer partitions. As with many other areas of mathematics, partition theory provides a number of easily-phrased questions (that elementary school students can understand) whose answers are either deep or (currently) non-existent.

In this talk, I will gently introduce you to the basics of the subject and discuss some of the people who have inspired research in the field over the last several years. I will also prove some well-known partition-theoretic results, including Euler's famous result that the number of partitions of an integer n into odd parts equals the number of partitions of n into distinct parts. This result is approximately 250 years old, but is by no means "dead".  I will demonstrate some results related to this one which have arisen quite recently (within the last year).  My hope is that all will find this talk refreshing and that some will be spurred on to future studies in partitions.