We are going to be more flexible with our First Wednesdays Virtual Speaker Series by offering the presentations on different days of the week, and different weeks of the month, therefore, its new name will be HOM SIGMAA Virtual Speaker Series.
You are cordially invited to attend the first HOM SIGMAA Virtual Speaker Series on Wednesday, September 28, at 4 PM PST/7 PM EST for a talk by Andrés Navas, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), on “Khajuraho’s magic square is a hypercube”.
The Zoom meeting link and passcode have been posted in the announcement for this talk on MAA Connect. You may also contact Dr. Ximena Catepillán for the link and passcode.
Abstract:
Among (pan)magic squares, the one engraved in a temple in the sacred city of Khajuraho in India is one of the most striking ones. I will focus on this marvelous object from the point of view of symmetries. In concrete terms, I will explain why the group attached to it is isomorphic to that of 384 rigid movements of the hypercube. To do this, I will revisit Pandita’s theorem on counting the number of panmagic squares of order 4. Several mathematical questions on groups of symmetries of general magic structures will be presented.
Short bio:
Andrés Navas is a graduate mathematician from Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), with a Master at IMPA, a PhD at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and a post-doc at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. His mathematical research focus on dynamical systems and group theory, around which he was invited as a speaker to the 2018 ICM in Rio de Janeiro. He is also an editor and responsible for the translation to Spanish of the French electronic journal “Images des Mathématiques”.
We hope to see you all there!
Jemma and Ximena