Speaker: Xinxuan (Jennifer) Wang

Abstract: You’re hosting a party with 5 couples attending. For the sake of helping them know each other better, you want to seat them so that men and women alternate, and nobody sits next to their spouse. This is the famous Problème Des Ménages, and it is not easy to solve at all. In this talk, I will give a straightforward solution using Rook Theory, which makes use of generating functions. I will illustrate how generating functions can reduce a complicated counting problem to simpler counting problems and power series manipulations.