SPEAKER: Don Sheehy TIME: Wednesday 12-1pm, November 15, 2006 PLACE: NSH 1507 TITLE: Flips in Computational Geometry ABSTRACT: In this talk, we will be looking at a basic primitive in computational geometry, the flip. Also known as bistellar flips, edge-flips, rotations, and Pachner moves, this local change operation has been discovered and rediscovered in a variety of fields (thus the many names) and has proven useful both as an algorithmic tool as well as a proof technology. For algorithm designers working outside of computational geometry, one can consider the flip move as a higher dimensional analog of the tree rotations used in binary trees. I will survey some of the most important results about flips with an emphasis on developing a general geometric intuition that has led to many advances.