Click on the image above to have a high-resolution version of the poster

 

Gaiane Panina

Gaiane Panina is a professor at the St. Petersburg State University. Her research interests are: convex polytopes, combinatorial geometry, polygonal linkages, all illustrated, like here. She particularly enjoys participating in student schools, both lecturing herself and attending classes given by her colleagues.

 Gaiane Panina

 

"Polytope algebra": We will gradually build up a beautiful algebraic object based on purely geometric objects — the polytope (graded) algebra developed by Peter McMullen. That is, we will introduce addition, multiplication, and even such crazy things as exponent and logarithm for polytopes. This construction has helped to prove the f-vector problem (I’ll try to hint how) and is directly related to the Chow rings of algebraic toric varieties (this is beyond our course). Surprisingly, there are no prerequisites. However, it is nice if you know what an abelian (that is, commutative) group, a ring, and the (graded) algebra of polynomials are.