Bridgewater State University
Mathematics Seminar
May 2, 2016, 3:30-4:30 PM

Speaker: Shannon Lockard
Title: Partitions and Trees
Abstract

In 1999, Neil Calkin and Herb Wilf introduced a labeled binary tree they fittingly named the Calkin-Wilf tree. This tree gained some notoriety through its use in an elegant proof of the countability of the rational numbers. In addition to this proof, Calkin and Wilf presented a connection between this tree and the hyperbinary partition function. In this talk, we will introduce the Calkin-Wilf tree and hyperbinary partitions. We will also give a generalization of the tree that will reveal several properties of a more general class of partitions, hyper m-ary partitions. This talk will be accessible to undergraduate students.


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