CAARMS9 Graduate Student Poster Session

CONFERENCE DATES:

June 24-27, 2003

Ninth Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences

CALL FOR PAPERS:

If you are a graduate student and would like to participate in the poster session, please send by e-mail your title, affiliation and full abstract (approximately 100-150 words) by MAY 15th to:

William A. Massey
E-mail: wmassey@princeton.edu
Phone: 609-258-7384

Note: You can send your title and abstract as a regular TEXTFILE (or html file). If your abstract includes mathematical formulas, please write them as TEX (see the sample below). The poster session will be held 5:00-7:00 pm Wednesday, June 25 at Purdue University. Materials such as poster boards, push pins, tape, etc. will be PROVIDED there. You only need to bring the mathematics (exposition, formulas, and graphs) on sheets of paper. We look forward to seeing you.

TRAVEL AND HOUSING SUPPORT:

We have funds to the support the travel and lodging of the graduate students who make poster presentations. More details will follow shortly.

GENERAL POSTER GUIDELINES:

You will be explaining your posters to the other attendees of the conference.
Make panels (8 1/2" by 11" sheets of paper preferably) that can be tacked up onto the board provided.
Your panels will consist of:
- Exposition (things like an overview, definitions, statement of goals, statement of results, etc.).
- Formulas (SLITEX if available, is a nice way to do them, but in general just make sure that the fontsize for your exposition and formulas in the poster panels is at least twice as big as for a paper you would publish).
- Graphs (if your talk lends itself to that).
- Pictures (diagrams and illustrations are always a plus).
Your poster must be prepared and ready to go by 4:30 pm on June 19.

SAMPLE TITLE (ALL CAPS), AFFILIATION, & ABSTRACT:

A POLYOMINO TILING PROBLEM OF THURSTON AND ITS CONFIGURATIONAL ENTROPY

Terry Gauss Newton
Department of Mathematics
University of Hilbert Space
xyz@hilbert.space.edu

We prove a conjecture of Thurston on tiling a certain triangular region $T_{3N+1}$ of the hexagonal lattice with three-in-line (``tribone'') tiles. It asserts that for all packings of $T_{3N+1}$ with tribones leaving exactly one uncovered cell, the uncovered cell must be the central cell. Furthermore, there are exactly $2^{N}$ such packings. This exact counting result is analogous to closed formulae for the number of allowable configurations in certain exactly solved models in statistical mechanics, and implies that the configurational entropy (per site) of tiling $T_{3N+1}$ with tribones with one defect tends to 0 as $N \rightarrow \infty$.