Joint Pure Math/C&O Grad Colloquium

Kieran Mastel, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Surreal Numbers and Games"

Surreal numbers were introduced in Donald Knuth’s book Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found True Happiness, and the full theory was developed by Conway in his book On Numbers and Games. In this talk, I will introduce surreal numbers via partisan games and discuss their properties as a number system. I will introduce the technique of chilling that makes these concepts relevant to the analysis of Go endgames.

MC 4020