The picture above was made with the evolutionary polygon approximation software that I found here.

Steven V Sam | e-mail | My office: 2-487

I am a fourth-year PhD student in the mathematics department at MIT under the supervision of Richard Stanley and Jerzy Weyman.

Starting Fall 2012, I will be a Miller fellow at Berkeley. Here is my CV.

My research interests include:

  • minimal free resolutions (see this survey article on Boij–Söderberg theory),
  • combinatorial representation theory,
  • group actions on varieties
In a nutshell, I'm interested in structure / classification problems for minimal free resolutions and in using free resolutions to understand other areas of math like invariant theory and algebraic geometry. Partitions and partition-like structures often show up in my work.

Research articles
Talks and expository notes
Live-texed notes for some math talks
Software that I have written
Links to math notes
Some LaTeX and PDF miscellany (and other software stuff I find useful)

Upcoming events (old events)

Old notes and seminars

Quantum groups seminar, Spring 2011
Cluster algebras seminar, Fall 2011
My notes for Alexei Borodin's course "Gibbs measures on branching graphs", Fall 2011

Math software

  • Macaulay 2 -- software for computations in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.
  • Stembridge's packages -- MAPLE packages for computations with symmetric functions, posets, and Coxeter groups.
  • GAP -- software for computations in group theory.
  • polymake -- software for convex polyhedra and related objects

A little about me

I've been playing Go since 2005 on and off. I'm ssam on KGS if you want to play. In high school, I played a lot of Dance Dance Revolution. I even appeared in a commercial that aired on G4 TV. I also participated in Mock Trial for three years. I enjoy bowling and playing pool, though I don't do these with any regularity. One of my favorite movies is Pulp Fiction. I'm also a Linux user, and am interested in Linux software in general. I run Ubuntu on my computer. I try to contribute to Wikipedia whenever I can. The most important part of my life is Leesa. My hometown is Upland, California.

I did my undergraduate degree in mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, where my advisor was David Eisenbud. I studied connections between representation theory of the general linear group and commutative algebra. I also worked closely with Kevin Woods and Matthias Beck on things related to lattice point enumeration in polytopes.

I contribute to the math blog Concrete Nonsense.

Other links