Elizabeth Wilmer
Associate Professor

elizabeth.wilmer@oberlin.edu

(440) 775-6707 (voice)
(440) 775-6638 (fax)

Department of Mathematics
Oberlin College
Oberlin, OH 44074

Curriculum vitae

Spring 2007

Office hours: Monday 2:00–3:00 p.m., Tuesday 3:00–4:30 p.m., and Thursday 3:30–5:00 p.m.

IM Office Hours Monday and Thursday evenings, 10:00–11:00 p.m. (approx.)

Recent reading

Updated sporadically. Some technical, some less so.

2/12/07
A near miss.
A showdown (and what happened)

8/1/06
A puzzle exhibition

2/24/06
The Dumpster
IRS Form QF

1/20/06
Court Documents & Summary Of United States Versus Google Over Search Data
When is 0.999... equal to 1?
Randomized knitting
Reversals of chance in paradoxical games

7/12/05
Playing with planarity
Mixing times of lozenge tiling and card shuffling Markov chains
Mathematical crochet: the hyperbolic plane and the Lorenz manifold

11/19/04
Google for eggheads
Mixing Times for Random Walks on Finite Lamplighter Groups
Live Pac-man, Pac-man art
Inclusion-Exclusion Redux

Less recent reading

Publications

• Reversals and transpositions over finite alphabets. With Jamie Radcliffe and Alex Scott. To appear, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics.
• A local limit theorem for a family of non-reversible Markov chains. Journal of Theoretical Probability 16 (2003), pp. 751–770.
• A note on completely disconnecting trees. Proceedings of the 33rd Southeastern Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, and Computing. Congressus Numerantium 159 (2002), pp. 143–149.
• Graphs induced by Gray codes. With Michael D. Ernst. Discrete Mathematics 257 (2002), pp. 585–598.
• Comparing eigenvalue bounds for Markov chains: when does Poincaré beat Cheeger? With Jason Fulman. Annals of Applied Probability 9 (1999), pp. 1–13.
• Exact Rates of Convergence for Some Simple Non-Reversible Markov Chains. Harvard University doctoral dissertation, 1999.

Preprints, etc.

• Markov Chains and Mixing Times, with Yuval Peres and David Levin. (Draft last updated 7/19/2006.)
• Ohio MAA talk followup links, 10/23/04.
• Notes on some conjectures of Ralf Stephan's (status page):
  
  
  • Conjecture 25 (counting cubic residues). With Oliver Schirokauer. 10/15/04.
  • Conjectures 72, 73, and 74 (counting non-reversible strings). 10/15/04.
  • Conjecture 87 (counting matchings on stars cross paths). 10/15/04.

Current courses

• MATH-343, Combinatorics.
• MATH-050, Dots, Lines, and Coin Flips.

Past courses

• MATH-220, Discrete Mathematics, Fall 2006.
• MATH-327, Group Theory, Spring 2006.
• MATH-329, Rings and Fields, fall 2003.