The IV AMMCS International Conference
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada | August 20-25, 2017
AMMSCS 2017 Plenary Talk
A polytopal generalization of Sperner's lemma
Francis Edward Su (Harvey Mudd College)
Sperner's lemma is a statement about labelled triangulations of
simplices whose applications include: finding fixed points of
highly nonlinear functions, and computing Nash equilibria in
game theory. With J. DeLoera and E. Peterson, we prove a
polytopal generalization of Sperner's lemma to polytopes in two
different ways, one constructive and one non-constructive, and
give applications of this result: to cake-cutting problems, to
minimal triangulations of polytopes, and to the game of Hex.
Francis Edward Su is the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of
Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, and Past-President of the
Mathematical Association of America. He received his Ph.D. from
Harvard University under Persi Diaconis. He will be Chern
Professor at MSRI during Fall 2017, co-organizing a semester on
Geometric and Topological Combinatorics. His research is in
this area, with a focus on applications to the social sciences,
and he has received multiple NSF research grants for his work.
He serves as an Associate Editor for the SIAM Journal on
Discrete Mathematics. He also has a passion for teaching and
popularizing mathematics. From the Mathematical Association of
America, he received the 2001 Hasse Prize for expository
writing, and the 2013 Haimo Award for distinguished teaching.
He authors the popular Math Fun Facts website and is creator of
"MathFeed," the math news app.