Special Year Seminar II
10:00am|Wolfensohn Hall
Topic: Beyond the g-conjecture
Speaker: Alan Stapledon
Affiliation: Institute for Advanced Study
Date: January 16, 2025
The conjecture in combinatorics that has received perhaps the most attention over the last 50 years is McMullen's g-conjecture. It provides a complete characterisation of the number of i-dimensional faces in a triangulation of an (d−1)-dimensional sphere for 0 less than or equal to i less than or equal to d−1. An extremely novel proof was given in 2020 by Papadakis and Petrotou involving anisotropy of quadratic forms in characteristic 2. We'll survey some of the history and ideas behind the proof of the conjecture, and then discuss recent work with Matt Larson, Isabella Novik and Kalle Karu.