Patterns, Games and Thickness

Hybrid; contact Caleb Marshall (cmarshall@math) for zoom link info.

*Note:* There will be a lunch at the Point with the speaker starting at noon. Please contact Caleb Marshall or Malabika Pramanik if you wish to join. 

An highly active research area is concerned with finding conditions on sparse sets that ensure the existence of many geometric patterns. I will present some results in this direction connecting Newhouse thickness and its generalizations to higher dimensions, games of Schmidt type and the existence of an abundance of homothetic copies of small sets.