The IV AMMCS International Conference

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada | August 20-25, 2017

AMMSCS 2017 Plenary Talk

A polytopal generalization of Sperner's lemma

Francis Edward Su (Harvey Mudd College)

Sperner's lemma is a statement about labelled triangulations of simplices whose applications include: finding fixed points of highly nonlinear functions, and computing Nash equilibria in game theory. With J. DeLoera and E. Peterson, we prove a polytopal generalization of Sperner's lemma to polytopes in two different ways, one constructive and one non-constructive, and give applications of this result: to cake-cutting problems, to minimal triangulations of polytopes, and to the game of Hex.
Francis Edward Su is the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, and Past-President of the Mathematical Association of America. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Persi Diaconis. He will be Chern Professor at MSRI during Fall 2017, co-organizing a semester on Geometric and Topological Combinatorics. His research is in this area, with a focus on applications to the social sciences, and he has received multiple NSF research grants for his work. He serves as an Associate Editor for the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. He also has a passion for teaching and popularizing mathematics. From the Mathematical Association of America, he received the 2001 Hasse Prize for expository writing, and the 2013 Haimo Award for distinguished teaching. He authors the popular Math Fun Facts website and is creator of "MathFeed," the math news app.