UMaine Calendar

On October 20 at 3 p.m. in Donald P. Corbett Hall Room 100, professor Tyrone Crisp will present a talk on “The Algebra of Pulling Things Apart” as part of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics Fall 2021 Colloquium Series. Crisp’s talk concerns a less well-known branch of algebra dealing with “pulling apart” operations, such as writing an integer as a sum of smaller integers, or decomposing a set into a disjoint union of subsets. The fact that there is typically more than one way to pull something apart means that the axiomatic study of operations like this is a little more subtle than for the “putting together” operations. In this talk, Crisp will introduce an algebraic structure — Hopf algebras — that can be used to study putting-together and pulling-apart operations of many different kinds.