Wednesday
19
November 2025
4:00 - 5:30 PM IST
Location
Room 207, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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Counting Magic Squares
Arts and Sciences Lecture Series
Jugal Verma
Visiting Professor
IIT Gandhinagar
Speaker
Three mathematicians from Panjab University, Harsh Anand, Vishwa Chandra Dumir and Hans Raj Gupta, proposed a number of conjectures about the enumeration of magic squares in the 1970s. Some of these conjectures were solved by Richard Stanley using methods of commutative algebra. Since then, several new proofs have been published. I will indicate solutions of some of these conjectures using the Ehrhart-Macdonald theory of counting lattice points in polytopes.
Speaker
Jugal Verma
Professor Verma is currently a Visiting Professor at IIT Gandhinagar. His broad research area is algebra. Earlier, he served as a faculty member at IIT Bombay, where he held several key positions, including Head of the Department of Mathematics, Chief Vigilance Officer, and Dean of Faculty Affairs. He played a pivotal role in establishing the National Centre for Mathematics in 2011—a joint initiative of TIFR and IIT Bombay. Professor Verma has also served as Vice-President of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society and is presently the President of the Mathematics Consortium of India. In recognition of his research contributions, he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India (Allahabad) in 2008 and a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2012.
