Current Teaching

Currently (Winter 2009), I am teaching section 102 of Math 100. Information for this course can be found here.

Academic History

My first year of post-secondary education was in North Island College. From there, I transferred to Simon Fraser University where I completed my undergraduate studies, obtaining an Bachelor of Science (First Class Honours) in the field of Mathematics in 2003.

I continued my studies at the University of British Columbia, obtaining my Masters degree in the area of Algebraic Combinatorics in 2005, under the supervision of Stephanie van Willigenburg.

I have continued my graduate work at UBC with Stephanie van Willigenburg, and will complete my PhD program in April of 2010.

Theses, Papers, and Talks

Here are links to my Masters Thesis and papers I've worked on.

Masters Thesis: Caterpillars, Ribbons, and The Chromatic Symmetric Function

Papers:

The Chromatic Symmetric Function of Symmetric and Near-Symmetric Caterpillars.
On the Chromatic Symmetric Function of a Tree, with Jeremy L. Martin and Jennifer D. Wagner. Appeared in Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A, Volume 115 (2), p 237-253.
Differences of Augmented Staircase Skew Schur Functions.
Skew Schur functions of Sums of Fat Staircases.
Differences of skew Schur functions of Staircases with Transposed Foundations.

Current Research

For my PhD thesis, I have been investigating instances of Schur-positivity among difference of certain skew Schur functions. I also inspect the threshold for which some of these differences become zero when the skew Schur functions are reduced to finitely many variables (i.e. are reduced to skew Schur polynomials). This is a weaker version of the problem of determining when two skew diagrams have the same skew Schur function.

Formulae are given for computing the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients appearing in several of these Schur-positive differences. Furthermore, in certain cases the differences can be seen to be multiplicity-free.

Conference Participation

6th Canadian Young Researchers Conference, University of Calgary, July 17-19, 2009.
5th Graduate Student Combinatorial Conference, University of Kentucky, March 27-29, 2009.
11th Coast Combinatorial Conference, University of Victoria, February 21-22, 2009.
Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, University of British Columbia, October 4-5, 2008.
4th Graduate Student Combinatorial Conference, University of California--Davis, June 19-23, 2008.
18th Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics, June 19-23, San Diego.
1st Graduate Student Combinatorial Conference, University of Minnesota, April 16-17, 2005.

Teaching

During the Winter term of 2004, I taught section 106 of Math 184 (Differential Calculus for Social Science and Commerce) at the University of British Columbia.

During the Winter term of 2008, I taught sections 120 and 121 of Math 180 (Differential Calculus with Physical Applications) at the University of British Columbia.

Currently (Winter of 2009), I am teaching section 102 of Math 100 (Differential Calculus with Applications to Physical Science and Engineering) at the University of British Columbia.

Contact Information

Email: mjmorin (at) math (dot) ubc (dot) ca
Office: Auditorium Annex #123
Mail: Mail may be sent to my mailbox, located in UBC's Mathematics Building at:

Department of Mathematics The University of British Columbia Room 121, 1984 Mathematics Road Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6T 1Z2
Phone #: 604-822-4631
(Note: The above phone number is a shared phone among math graduate students in the Auditorium Annex, and not a personal office phone.)

Matthew Morin