SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 7 - 9 may 2008

New Fellows Seminar

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Professor Ole Warnaar
Senior Research Fellow, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

Ole Warnaar received his PhD in mathematical physics from the University of Amsterdam. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Melbourne, he returned to the Netherlands to take up a research fellowship of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. He returned to Melbourne as an Australian Research Council Research Fellow. He has recently been appointed to a chair in pure mathematics at the University of Queensland. Ole is a leading researcher in the field of elliptic hypergeometric series. He has made important contributions to algebraic combinatorics, and is a member of the permanent committee of Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics, the largest annual combinatorics conference. He has been an active member of the Australian Mathematical Society. From 2004 to 2006 he was editor of the Australian Mathematical Society Gazette, and currently is the society's vice-president. He also is one of the organisers of the Melbourne University/BHP Billiton School Mathematics Competition.

Integer partitions

The famous mathematician Leonhard Euler was probably the first person to study the problem of partitioning the integers. The sum 3+3+2+1+1 is an example of a partition of 10, but so are 4+2+1+1+1+1 and 9+1 and 39 other sums. There are many questions that can be asked about partitions and, typically, the simpler the question, the harder the answer. In this presentation I will try to explain some of the most famous and beautiful results in the study of partitions.