Joint PM/CO Grad Colloquium

Sean Monahan, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

Have you ever wondered if you and n-1 of your closest friends can all park in a one-way parking lot with exactly n spaces, given that each of you has a favourite parking space? No? Oh… well that makes sense. However, in this talk I will show you that the combinatorics behind this problem is quite fun. I will introduce the main objects called "parking functions", show a couple of interesting combinatorial interpretations of them involving labelled Dyck paths and trees, and briefly discuss their uses.