Waterloo Combinatorics Seminar

This is the website for the Algebraic and Enumerative Combinatorics Seminar at the University of Waterloo. We view algebraic combinatorics broadly, explictly including algebraic enumeration and related asymptotic and bijective combinatorics as well as algebraic combinatorics as it appears in pure algebra and in applications outside mathematics.

We begin with a pre-seminar which is designed to get participants up to speed on useful and interesting background for the talk. It will be at the level for beginning grad students. Then there will be a short coffee break followed by the seminar itself.

Our audience consists principally of combinatorics faculty and grad students. Seminar talks are 50 minutes with questions following.

If you are speaking, we need your abstract at least a week in advance so it can make the deadline for the Friday math faculty seminar mailing.

Fall 2025

Usual location and time: 1:30 pre-seminar, 2:30 seminar, both in MC 6029.

• September 11: Alex Wilson, Centralizers in the Plactic Monoid
  Click here for abstract

  Let $u$ be a word over the positive integers. Motivated in part by a question of representation theory, we study the centralizer set $C(u)$, which consists of words $w$ for which $wu$ and $uw$ are Knuth-equivalent. In particular, we characterize $C(u)$ when $u$ has few letters or is a certain type of decreasing sequence, and we address related enumerative questions.

• September 18: There will be a watch party for a relevant talk from this ICERM workshop.

• September 25: Jesse Huang

• October 2: Nathan Pagliaroli

• October 9:

• October 16: No seminar on account of reading week

• October 23:

• October 30: Leigh Foster

• November 6: Graham Denham

• November 13:

• November 20: No seminar on account of Tim Miller’s defense

• November 27: Zeus Dantas E Moura

• December 4:

• December 11: