The Story of the Alternating Sign Matrix Conjecture

Harvard FAS

This seminar is intended to illustrate how research in mathematics actually progresses, using recent examples from the field of algebraic combinatorics. We will learn about the story of the search for and discovery of a proof of a formula conjectured by Mills-Robbins-Rumsey in the early 1980's: the number of n x n alternating sign matrices.Alternating sign matrices are a curious family of mathematical objects, generalizing permutation matrices, which arise from an algorithm for evaluating…