Graduate-Faculty Seminar

The mathematics of bell-ringing

-
Speaker(s): Anna Nelson
Change ringing is the long-practiced art of ringing tuned church tower bells in a particular order, resulting in a series of mathematical sequences. Given a certain set of moves and without sheet music, change-ringers will ring every permutation of bells without repeating a permutation, and somehow end with the same sequence of bells they started with. In this talk, we will investigate the mathematical foundation of change ringing, look at specific change ringing sequences, and how these changes are related to group theoretic ideas, such as Cayley graphs, Hamiltonian cycles, and the Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter algorithm.

Gross 330