You are cordially invited to attend the first HOM SIGMAA Virtual Speaker Series on Wednesday, September 28, at 4 PM PST/7 PM EST for a talk by Andrés Navas, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), on "Khajuraho's magic square is a hypercube".Abstract:
Among (pan)magic squares, the one engraved in a temple in the sacred city of Khajuraho in India is one of the most striking ones. I will focus on this marvelous object from the point of view of symmetries. In concrete terms, I will explain why the group attached to it is isomorphic to that of 384 rigid movements of the hypercube. To do this, I will revisit Pandita's theorem on counting the number of panmagic squares of order 4. Several mathematical questions on groups of symmetries of general magic structures will be presented.
Short bio:
Andrés Navas is a graduate mathematician from Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), with a Master at IMPA, a PhD at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and a post-doc at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. His mathematical research focus on dynamical systems and group theory, around which he was invited as a speaker to the 2018 ICM in Rio de Janeiro. He is also an editor and responsible for the translation to Spanish of the French electronic journal "Images des Mathématiques".