ALGEBRA AND COMBINATORICS SEMINAR Tuesday 23 September 2008, 2pm in Priestly 641 Anne Street, Maths, UQ Combinatorics: The first 4000 years                      Abstract We consider some combinatorial structures arising from 2200 BCE onwards: 1. Configurations found in China over 4000 years ago, as well as later configurations found in Persia, India, Siam and Europe; 2. Work by Ramon Lull, who was described by Donald Michie (in his foreword to Martin Gardner's Logic Machines and Diagrams), as "one of the most inspired madmen who ever lived'', and Jonathan Swift's lampooning of Lull in Gulliver's Travels; 3. Two puzzles, each constructed by cutting up a square and assembling the pieces into a picture or reassembling them (differently) into a square. These puzzles are the Tangram, which originated in China, with the square cut into seven pieces, and the Stomachion, which originated with the Arabs, who cut the square into 14 pieces. Archimedes raised the question of enumerating the ways that all 14 pieces of the Stomachion could be rearranged into a square. Subsequent statements of other enumeration problems, and especially comments by Plutarch on a disagreement between the mathematician and astronomer Hipparchus and the Stoic logician Chrysippus, suggest that combinatorial problems were in fact considered by the ancient Greeks. This is probably the biggest surprise in recent studies of the history of combinatorics. All welcome. (Image: A stomachion elephant, from Mathworld) http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/cdmc/Seminars.html