January 18

Marcelo Aguiar ( TAMU )

Bimonoids in species

Abstract: This talk is addressed to graduate students interested in algebra and combinatorics.

The category of species furnishes the right framework for the study of algebraic structures associated to combinatorial objects. One of the advantages of the notion of species is its simplicity: roughly, a species is a family of vector spaces, one space for each finite set. We will define species and concentrate on the notion of "bimonoid" in the category of species, illustrating it with several examples of a combinatorial nature.

Little background will be needed to follow the talk.