ayah almousa

First, let me praise another excellent talk by Ayah Almousa; she presented newest work with my friend Anton Dochterman as well as Ben Smith on triangulations of root polytopes and the applications to minimal resolutions. Recall: A free resolution is a way to write a module M as a Matryoshka doll of free modules, that is, as an exact sequence

$0 \rightarrow F_i \rightarrow F_{i-1} \rightarrow \cdots \rightarrow F_{1} \rightarrow M \rightarrow 0$

where the $F_i$ are free (that is, as simple as you could ever want). And whoever tried to ever studies something hard knows how valuable it is to write something in simpler terms. A minimal free resolution is just that, and a root polytope is a polytope whose vertices correspond to the root directions of a Coxeter group. Ayah surveyed how triangulations of the latter are related to resolutions of monomial ideals, and applied this to prove some new results as well as give more insightful proofs to previously known ones. Bravo, Ayah, Anton and Ben! Here is her talk.