WITS (what I did this summer) talks: "Tiling Infinite One-Dimensional Bathrooms" and "Playing Nim on Complete Graphs"

Tiling Infinite One-Dimensional Bathrooms, by Jason Saied '16:

This summer, I worked in the field of symbolic dynamics, which isn't nearly as scary as it sounds. The objects of study in this field are called shift spaces, which are collections of infinite sequences with a few additional properties. My group and I examined a special type of these called skew Sturmian shift spaces and classified them up to the relevant equivalence relation, called conjugacy. Symbolic dynamics is used to study tilings of the real line, so if you'd like to apply this research, I guess you could use it to tile your bathroom. As long as it's infinite. And one-dimensional.