CANCELLED Aryaman Jal: Asymptotic Combinatorics and q-Counting

The late combinatorialist Herb Wilf memorably said that a generating function is a clothesline on which we hang numbers. Questions in enumerative combinatorics are often clarified by a close analytic study of this clothesline. In this talk, we survey standard techniques in analytic combinatorics via well-known examples. We will also introduce the notion of q-analogues of combinatorial objects and formulae, with particular focus on standard Young tableaux and forests.

This talk precedes Professor Sara Billey’s colloquium talk  on “Cyclotomic generating functions” and is accessible to a broad audience (master and PhD students).