Garden of Eden partitions for Bulgarian and Austrian solitaire

Abstract: In the early 1980s, Martin Gardner popularized the game called Bulgarian Solitaire through his writings in Scientific American. After a brief introduction to the game, we will discuss a few results proven about Bulgarian Solitaire around the time of the appearance of Gardner's article and then quickly turn to the question of finding an exact formula for the number of Garden of Eden partitions that arise in this game. I will then introduce a related game known as Austrian Solitaire and consider a similar question about the Garden of Eden states that appear. The talk will be completely self-contained and should be accessible to a wide ranging audience. This is joint work with Brian Hopkins and Robson da Silva.

number theory

Audience: researchers in the topic

Combinatorial and additive number theory (CANT 2021)

Series comments: This is the nineteenth in a series of annual workshops sponsored by the New York Number Theory Seminar on problems in combinatorial and additive number theory and related parts of mathematics.

Registration for the conference is free. Register at cant2021.eventbrite.com.

The conference website is www.theoryofnumbers.com/cant/ Lectures will be broadcast on Zoom. The Zoom login will be emailed daily to everyone who has registered on eventbrite. To join the meeting, you may need to download the free software from www.zoom.us.

The conference program, list of speakers, and abstracts are posted on the external website.