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Conjugate!

Math 502: Combinatorics II

This is the second semester of an introductory graduate-level course on combinatorics. We will be covering symmetric function theory, Young tableaux, counting with group actions, designs, matroids, finite geometries, and not-so-finite geometries.

Syllabus

For more details, see the Course Syllabus.

Resources

Recommended (but optional) books are listed in the Syllabus above.

These are the lecture notes from last year; major changes will be updated here as the course progresses.

Intro and Schur functions

Omega involution

Hall inner product

RSK and the Pieri rules

RSK, Knuth equivalence, and JDT

Littlewood-Richardson tableaux and crystals

NEW - proof of Littlewood-Richardson product rule using Hall inner product

Crash course on representation theory

Characters and the Murnaghan-Nakayama rule

Counting with group actions

NEW - Properties of the Frobenius map

Designs

Matroids

Matroids II

Finite Geometries

Not So Finite Geometries

Office hours

My office is Weber 125, near the west door of the tea room. Come find me:

Homework

Homework assignments are starting out as the same as last year’s homeworks; I may add new problems to the ends of the homeworks based on what we cover in class. As usual you may choose a subset of the problems to hand in that adds up to 10 points.

Homework 1

Homework 2

Homework 3

Homework 4

Homework 5

Homework 6

Homework 7

Homework 8

Homework 9

Homework 10

Homework 11

Homework 12

Homework 13

Homework 14

Final Projects

The final projects written by the students will, with their permission, be posted here at the end of term.

Here is an Overleaf template to get you started with the format:

Overleaf Template for Final Project