The seminar will resume in Spring 2026. It is currently organized by Timothy Blanton, Lisa Johnston, and Soyeon Kim. We intend for the seminar to be an informal introduction to topics of broad interest in algebra and discrete math, primarily aimed at people without lots of background in those areas. First and second year grad students who are interested in ADM are especially welcome!

For Spring 2026, we will meet in MSB 2112 every Friday from 2:10-3:00 pm. We'll read Richard P. Stanley’s Algebraic Combinatorics along with Enumerative Combinatorics, Vol. 1, and Bjorner+Brenti Combinatorics of Coxeter Groups followed by a series of lightning talks highlighting active research topics within the department. In addition, there will be pretalks for select speakers of the ADM seminar.

1-2 units of MAT 298 are available upon request for participants. The faculty mentor is Chenchen Zhao.

• (4/3) Meeting 1: Logistics + Walks on graphs
• (4/10) Meeting 2: Posets (Ellie AC chapter 4-4.2), Young diagrams (Josh AC chapter 6-6.3)
• (4/17) Meeting 3: q-binomial coefficients (Ryan AC 6.4-6.6), Young tableaux (Penelope AC ch 8-8.1 + Appendix 1?)
• (4/24) Meeting 4: Robinson–Schensted–Knuth correspondence (RSK) (Penelope? TBD…AC Appendix 1,2)
• (5/1) Meeting 5: Coxeter groups (Anouk, Bjorner Brenti Section 1.1-1.3/1.3) and the Bruhat order (Tanner BB 2.1,2.2)
• (5/8) Meeting 6: Combinatorial commutative algebra (simplical complexes, the face ring) (Ellie, Josh)
• (5/15) Meeting 7: TBD
• (5/22) Meeting 8: Lightning talks (Lisa, ???, …)
• (5/29) Meeting 9: Lightning talks

• April 11: Jake Quinn: “An intro to type A affine Hecke algebra representations”
• April 18: Jake Quinn: cont.
• April 25: Jillian Eddy: “Polyhedral invariants from a data-oriented perspective”
• May 2: no speaker
• May 9: Artyom Lisitsyn: Bipartite diagrams and hypertrees (in physics), and the (positive) Grassmannian
• May 16: Jake Quinn: Double affine Hecke algebra representations
• May 23: Jake Quinn: Double affine Hecke algebra representations (cont.)
• May 30: Mary Claire Simone: Plethysm
• June 6: Timothy Blanton: Chip-firing

• Week of 1/13: Soyeon Kim, Cluster algebras and plabic graphs
• Week of 1/20: Soyeon Kim, Cluster algebras and plabic graphs
• Week of 1/27: Lisa Johnston, A crash course on symmetric functions and Young tableaux Pt.1
• Week of 2/03: Lisa Johnston, A crash course on symmetric functions and Young tableaux Pt.2
• Week of 2/10: Jon Erickson, Grassmannians and flag manifolds
• Week of 2/17: Jon Erickson, Grassmannians and flag manifolds
• Week of 2/24: Timothy Paczynski, Toric varieties
• Week of 3/3: Anouk Brose, Intro to polytopes, lattice polytopes and Ehrhart Theory
• Week of 3/10: Brittney Marsters, Ehrhart Theory and Hilbert Series: Semigroup Edition

Note: The organizers are planning to give talks for the first several weeks, but anyone is welcome to speak. Talks which have two parts should be independent enough that anyone attending the second talk (but not the first) can still follow along and learn.

The most commonly asked question, especially for new graduate students, is: “I would like to speak, but I don't know what to talk about! What can I give a talk on?”

The list is a work in progress - check back soon for updates. Suggestions are welcome!