The Grand Rapids Community College Mathematics Department will host its next Mathematics Seminar on Wednesday, February 20, 3:00 – 4:00 PM in 107 Cook. Our speaker will be GRCC Mathematics Instructor Sang Lee. The title and abstract for Sang’s talk are at the bottom.
This talk will take a very common idea from basic algebra, multiplying polynomials, and examine its relationship to something even more fundamental, counting. Knowledge of mathematics at the level of Intermediate Algebra (Ma 107) or above will be helpful, as would some familiarity with counting techniques. As always, everyone is welcome to attend.
Pop and cookies will be served at 2:45 PM.
Counting with Polynomials
Do we obtain any valuable information from the product of polynomials? Specifically, what do coefficients and exponents tell us when polynomials are multiplied? In this talk, we introduce a counting technique that utilizes the coefficients and exponents in the product of polynomials. We then examine some counting problems such as determining the number of ways for different routes, muffin orders, changing a dollar, solutions to an equation, and partitions of an integer.
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