Games as Mathematics: SET and cap-sets

Speaker:
Organiser:
Mrinal Kumar, Vinod M. Prabhakaran
Date:
Monday, 23 Jun 2025, 16:00 to 17:30
Venue:
Main Lecture Theatre (AG-66)
Abstract

In this talk we will play the game of SET and then, using insights from the game, formulate the maximal cap-set problem and prove it for some special cases.

Short Bio:
Jyothi Krishnan grew up solving puzzles and reading Martin Gardner’s books. Not realising that recreational mathematics provided any scope for a career, she pursued her other love of mechanics and collected a BTech from NIT Calicut, an MS from IIT Madras and a PhD from UC Berkeley. She has worked as a programmer, a bridge engineer, a research mathematician and a school teacher. Having been introduced to the world of modern board games during her PhD, she realised that it was a way to make fairly complicated mathematical reasoning accessible to a large number of children so she created a job playing games with kids in an alternative school in Bangalore. After running her game lab for 4 years she discovered like-minded people at CCL where she is thrilled to be making a living playing games and solving puzzles. At CCL she creates games and looks after math content.