AMR-RMA
Recent Mathematical Advances Distinguished Lecture Series
Wednesday, November 18, 2026
8:00 AM (Los Angeles), 11:00 AM (Montreal, New York), 4:00 PM (London) 5:00 PM (Leipzig, Madrid, Paris) 6:00 PM (Tel-Aviv)
Sergey Fomin
University of Michigan
TITLE: Incidence geometry and tiled surfaces
Abstract
We show that various classical theorems of linear incidence geometry, such as the theorems of Pappus, Desargues, Möbius, and so on, can be interpreted as special cases of a general result that involves a tiling of a closed oriented surface by quadrilateral tiles. This yields a general mechanism for producing new incidence theorems and for generalizing and interpreting the known ones.
This is joint work with Pavlo Pylyavskyy.
About the speaker
Sergey Fomin is the Richard P. Stanley Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. He is renowned for his pioneering work with Andrei Zelevinsky introducing cluster algebras, which have had a major impact on algebra, geometry, representation theory, and integrable systems. He has also made foundational contributions to the theory of totally positive matrices—matrices whose minors are all positive—and its extensions to Lie groups. He received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research in 2018, jointly with Zelevinsky, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. He was an invited speaker at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians.