Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the University has instruction to cancel all in-person events through the Spring semester to adhere to city and state orders limiting public gatherings. Events still running must now take place Online— listed events will include a link in which one may access the Online webspace:

To view Dr. Greene’s talk, enter his Online chatroom via Microsoft Teams— it will open at 3:00pm on Friday, March 12th, 2021.

Peg Problems

Dr. Joshua Greene
Professor of Mathematics
Boston College

“Over a century ago, Otto Toeplitz asked whether every Jordan curve in the Euclidean plane contains four points at the vertices of a square. The problem remains open to this day, but it has inspired a number of related questions and partial results. For the talk, I will survey this collection of problems and discuss a result with Andrew Lobb: for every smooth Jordan curve and for every set of four concyclic points in the Euclidean plane, there exists an orientation-preserving similarity taking the four points onto the curve. The proof involves symplectic geometry in a surprising way.”

*Click to view the event flyer.