Simon Fraser University

Computers can be programmed to do a variety of tasks which, if a human had done them, we might identify as creative tasks. But does that mean that they themselves are creative? We examine the state of the art in computer-generated poetry, and examine...

A widespread approach for tsunami simulation is to model the ocean with the shallow water equations (SWE). The steady-state ocean floor deformation that results from a seismic event is often used as the initial ocean surface profile for the SWE...

On May 27, 2019, the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, a diamond-access journal founded by the late Herb Wilf and Neil Calkin, will celebrate its 25th birthday by organizing a satellite conference in conjunction with CanaDAM 2019. There will be...

Solvers for the Boolean satisfiability problem have been increasingly used to solve hard problems from many fields and now routinely solve problems with millions of variables. Combinatorial problems are a natural target, as SAT solvers contain...

We explore graphs of high cop number. We give new lower bounds for cop number of graphs of high girth. We also present a new class of undirected graphs with cop number $(1-o(1)) \sqrt{n/2}$ and a class of directed graphs with cop number $(1-o(1))...

A theme that cuts across many domains of computer science and mathematics is to find simple representations of complex mathematical objects such as graphs, functions, or distributions on data. These representations need to capture how the object...

We consider an aggregation model that consists of an active transport equation for the macroscopic population density, where the velocity has a nonlocal functional dependence on the density, modelled via an interaction potential. We set up the model...

Peritrichously flagellated bacteria such as E. coli swim in a fluid environment by rotating motors embedded in the cell membrane and consequently rotating multiple helical flagella. We present a mathematical model of a microswimmer that can freely...

The PPSZ algorithm, due to Paturi, Pudlak, Saks and Zane, is currently the fastest known algorithm for the k-SAT problem, for every k>3. For 3-SAT, a tiny improvement over PPSZ was obtained by Hertli. We introduce a biased version of the PPSZ...

Could an asteroid that explodes over the ocean generate a tsunami threatening coastal populations far away? We show simulations of tsunami propagation from asteroid-generated airbursts. We then present a 1D model with an explicit solution to better...