Sara Billey is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington in the sometimes sunny city of Seattle. Her curriculum vitae "provides an overview of a person's life and qualifications" according to wikipedia. See also her Google scholar page. And, for more fun historical background, Rebecca Myers won the 2013 Grand Prize for the AWM Essay Contest writing the biography Sara Billey: The Most Famous "Sara in Math".

• I started 3 Youtube channels during Covid-times: Algebraic Combinatorics Online Workshop (ACOW), UW Combinatorics Seminar, and FPSAC 2020. These are events that I helped organize this year. More details below.

• Teaching: In the fall, I will teach Representation Theory of the Symmetric Group

• Seminar: I co-organize the Combinatorics Seminar at UW with Isabella Novik, Ricky Liu, Gaku Liu, and Kevin Liu (no relation among them).

• I am on the editorial board for three journals Algebraic Combinatorics(ALCO), Annals of Combinatorics, and Journal of Combinatorics. I was formerly an editor for Advances in Math for 12 years.

• I am the president of The Combinatorics Consortium (TCC), which is an organization for the promotion of conferences and publication of diamond open access journals in combinatorics. We are a 501(c)(3) public charity raising money to support the cause.

• Conferences: I was on the organizing committee for FPSAC Online 2020. I was on sabbatical in 2020 and co-organizing a semester at Mittag-Leffler Institute: Algebraic and Enumerative Combinatorics. I was program co-chair for FPSAC 2019 in Slovenia.

• Science Fiction in Action: Graphlopedia:A fingerprint database of graphs. Check it out!s

• Community: Timea Tihanyi from the School of Art, Art History and I were the 2018 recipients of the UW College of Arts and Sciences Bergstrom Award for Art and Science. Here is a bit of our collaboration at Slip Rabbit Studio.

• Community: I am was the founding faculty mentor for the UW Student Chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). I also served one term on the Policy and Advocacy for AWM.

• Mathday: I speak (almost) every year at Mathday; one of the biggest mathematical events for high school students in the country where this year 1650 students came to campus for a smorgasbord of mathematical experiences. In the past I have talked about mathematical card tricks, Sudoku, math of the web, the Gale-Shapley algorithm and computer proof techniques, ranking models like US News and World Reports, Bitcoin, and Math/Art/WXML projects. I am hoping Mathday will come back soon!

• In the news: I often teach Math 381: Discrete Mathematical Modeling. In order to learn about the modeling process, we study real world problems that affect real people. We will seek out and solve problems related to the community around us. The course culminates in a final modeling project. Final projects can be inspired by some of the challenges faced by non-profit organizations, government agencies, small businesses, or the university. If you have a problem that might be suitable for this class to study, please let me know. We got some good press from the poster sessions, but the links seem to have expired! Alas, here are the titles:
  • Taking Math to the Streets:Students solve real world problems with mathematics modeling in UW Week (Jan. 8, 2009)
  • Students Use Math to Help Community Partners Solve Problems UW College of Arts and Sciences web page (March 17, 2009)
  I often teach a service-learning course on Discrete Math Modeling. In 2018, I taught an extra big group of 65 students in modeling with 27 different community projects. Here is the list of students with their project titles:
  • Math 381 Poster Session, December 5, 2018

Research Topics

My research is in algebraic combinatorics and everything related to it. Lately, I have been getting interested in enumerative,probabalistic, and asympototic combinatorics too. Combinatorics is the study of counting and bijective proofs, so an algebraic combinatorialists counts algebraic objects. In particular, I am interested in tableaux, tanglegrams, Schubert polynomials, Schubert varieties, flag manifolds, Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials, Stanley symmetric functions, Bruhat order, Weyl group and root systems of all types etc. I am a strong advocate of using computers to do math research, in particular for obtaining data for conjectures and computer verified proofs. Recently, I have been interested in problems which are not decidable by any possible algorithm in finite time.

Other Fun Stuff

• "What is Combinatorics?" This is a webinar that I got to do with Mark Green and Jacques Verstraete for the series "Frontiers in Math" by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, October 2018. It is aimed at a broad audiance.
• What is Combinatorics? quotes collected by Igor Pak.
• Photos from my collection in Seattle, mostly around the University of Washington. It's a gorgeous place to live!
• Zometool Competition: I used to host the annual Zometool Competition for SIMUW; our high school math camp. This program has now ended.
• Women in Mathematics: This is a history of women in mathematics going back to the fifth century B.C.
• Math and Juggling Summarizing the references for my Mathday talk 2009.
• Check out Jack Lee's web page on cool things to do in Seattle. I have visited almost every place on this list and recommend them all.
• Sailing: I started sailboat racing a few years back with the UW sailing club, and I have become more and more pasionate about it. My boat was ranked number 20 in the Puget Sound by 48 North for 2021.

Consulting Policy