Bulgarian Solitaire & Garden of Eden Partitions

You are invited to the following talk, sponsored by the Math Club.

Title: Bulgarian Solitaire & Garden of Eden Partitions
Speaker: Dr. James Sellers
Date/Time: Thursday, December 1, 6-7 pm
Location: TL 128, Science and Technology Building, Penn State Harrisburg

We consider a game closely related to partitions known as Bulgarian Solitaire which was popularized in the early 1980s in Scientific American by Martin Gardner. We will briefly discuss a few results proven about this game around the time of the appearance of Gardner's article. We will then quickly turn to a question recently posed by Brian Hopkins and Michael Jones about finding an exact formula for the number of Garden of Eden partitions (which are closely associated with Bulgarian solitaire and which I will define in the talk). I will prove such an exact formula which was developed a few years ago when I first met Brian Hopkins and learned of this problem. The talk will be completely self-contained and the proof of the main result will follow in an elementary fashion from Dyson's generating function for the number of partitions of n with fixed rank r.

Accessible to a wide ranging audience, from undergraduate students to faculty members.