Colloquium: Dr. Mohamed Omar

October 7, 2022 : 2:00pm – 3:00pm

How Many Cards Can Avoid a SET?           

Dr. Mohamed Omar

Associate Professor of Mathematics

Harvey Mudd College

SET is a popular real-time card game where players search for special triples of cards among a table of cards that are face-up. A common issue when playing the game is not having a SET among the face-up cards. What is the maximum number of cards that can be face-up while avoiding a SET? Surprisingly, this question is at the heart of a decades old central problem in extremal combinatorics and additive number theory that had a major breakthrough in 2017. In this talk, we describe the breakthrough, and how the presenter used ideas in its development to make headway on a range of disparate problems in combinatorics.