Patricia Hersh's Home Page
Patricia Hersh
Department of Mathematics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
Email: plhersh at uoregon dot edu
Office location: 317 Fenton Hall
Welcome to my home page. I am a professor in the
math department
at the University of Oregon.
Before this, I was a professor at
North Carolina State University and prior to that an assistant professor (and promoted to associate professor with tenure) at
Indiana University-Bloomington,
a postdoc at MSRI (fall 2004),
Michigan (2001-2004) and
the
University of Washington (1999-2001), went to grad school at
MIT (1995-1999), and undergrad at
Harvard (1991-1995).
I spent fall 2010 visiting
Cornell
thanks to the very generous support of the
Ruth Michler
Prize of the
Association for Women in Mathematics
(AWM).
Richard Stanley was my
Ph.D. advisor, and
Phil Hanlon was my NSF postdoc sponsoring scientist at Michigan;
Persi Diaconis was my undergraduate advisor.
Research:
Here are my
publications,
talk slides and upcoming talks/conferences, and my
CV. This research
is supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (2024-present) and has also been supported in recent years by NSF research grants DMS-195393 and DMS-1500987. Research of my graduate students is supported by NSF RTG grant DMS-2039316.
Research interests: combinatorics, particularly as it relates to fields like topology, commutative algebra, representation theory and theoretical
computer science.
I'm especially interested in
combinatorial methods for studying topological structure, often with
algebraic applications in mind.
Current and Former Ph.D. students: Annika Christiansen, current 3rd year Ph.D. student. Stephen Lacina, University of Oregon, June 2023 Ph.D., tenure track assistant professor at Truman State University. Chetak Hossan, NCSU, December 2019 Ph.D. (with coadvisor Nathan Reading), assistant professor of instruction at Texas State University. Grace Stadnyk, NCSU, August 2019 Ph.D., tenure track assistant professor at Furman University. Molly Lynch, NCSU, June 2019 Ph.D., tenure track assistant professor and department chair at Hollins University. Ruth Davidson, NCSU 2014 Ph.D. (with coadvisor Seth Sullivant), first position NSF postdoctoral research fellow at UIUC.
Rebecca Swanson, Indiana
University-Bloomington 2010 Ph.D., teaching professor at Colorado School of Mines.
Editorial boards:
Forum of Mathematics PI (editorial board, March 2019--present); Forum of Mathematics SIGMA (editorial board, March 2019--present); Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics (managing editor, January 2023--present; advisory board member, April 2019--present), Proceedings of the AMS (combinatorics editor, February 2014--January 2022) and SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (editorial board, January 2011--December 2016).
Some helpful
organizations:
NSF,
AMS,
AWM,
MAA and
SIAM.
Teaching:
Winter 2025 quarter:
-
Math 607 -- Enumerative Combinatorics (MW noon-1:20pm in 107 Peterson Hall)
Fall 2024 quarter:
-
Math 634 -- Algebraic Topology (MWF 11-11:50am in 193 Anstett Hall)
Information for classes taught in previous quarters/semesters
Seminar and conference organizing:
Currently coorganizing:
-
Cascade Lectures in Combinatorics conference series (CALICO), funded by NSF research training grant DMS-2039316.
Recently organized/coorganized:
-
University of Oregon Math Department Colloquium.
- Triangle Lectures in
Combinatorics (TLC), series of combinatorial workshops.
Served on the TLC Steering Committee with
Ricky Liu (NCSU),
Ezra Miller (Duke),
Gabor Pataki (UNC Chapel
Hill), and
Cynthia Vinzant (NCSU).
- MSRI Workshop on Geometric and Topological Combinatorics: Modern Techniques and Methods, Berkeley, CA, October 9-13, 2017. Coorganized with
Vic Reiner (U. Minnesota),
Bernd Sturmfels (UC Berkeley),
Frank Vallentin (U. Köln) and
Günter Ziegler (Freie U. Berlin).
-
AMS special session on representation stability and its applications, Bloomington, IN, April 1-2, 2017. Coorganized with
Jeremy Miller (Purdue) and Andrew Putman (Notre Dame).
-
70th birthday conference for Richard Stanley at MIT (Cambridge, MA), June 23-27, 2014. Coorganized with
Karen Collins (Wesleyan),
Caroline Klivans (Brown), and
Alex Postnikov (MIT).
-
AMS Committee on the Profession panel discussion on "Online courses: benefits and pitfalls". Coorganized with
Dan Abramovich (Brown), held at the
Joint Math Meetings, Baltimore, MD,
January 15-18, 2014.
-
AMS special session on algebraic combinatorics, Oxford, MS, March 1-3, 2013. Coorganized with
Dennis Stanton (U. Minnesota).
-
AMS Committee on the Profession panel discussion on "Getting Started as a Research Mathematician", held at the Joint Math Meetings, San Diego, CA, January 9-12, 2013.
Older events previously organized/coorganized:
