Math Club: Dominos and Determinants- Lecture # 125

Professor Benedek Valko, UW-Madison THow many ways can you tile a chessboard with 2x1 dominos if we remove two of the opposite corners? What if we have a board of size 2xn or (2n)x(2n)? Surprisingly, these problems are connected to lots of different fields of mathematics: graph theory, linear algebra, analysis. We will discuss the solution to these problems and some of the connections.B Benedek Valko received his PhD from the Technical University of Budapest (Hungary) and has been a member of the Department of Mathematics from 2008. His main interest is probability theory. He is the director of the Wisconsin Mathematics, Engineering and Science Talent Search Questions? Contact Jeganathan Sriskandarajah at (608) 243-4316.