This volume represents the proceedings of the 4th annual meetings of the Underrepresented Students in Topology and Algebra Research Symposium (USTARS 2014), held on 11-13 April 2014 in Berkeley, California.
For a simple Lie algebra, over $mathbb{C}$, we consider the weight which is the sum of all simple roots and denote it $tilde{alpha}$. We formally use Kostants weight multiplicity formula to compute the dimension of the zero-weight space. In type $A_r
$, $tilde{alpha}$ is the highest root, and therefore this dimension is the rank of the Lie algebra. In type $B_r$, this is the defining representation, with dimension equal to 1. In the remaining cases, the weight $tilde{alpha}$ is not dominant and is not the highest weight of an irreducible finite-dimensional representation. Kostants weight multiplicity formula, in these cases, is assigning a value to a virtual representation. The point, however, is that this number is nonzero if and only if the Lie algebra is classical. This gives rise to a new characterization of the exceptional Lie algebras as the only Lie algebras for which this value is zero.
The domination number of a graph $G = (V,E)$ is the minimum cardinality of any subset $S subset V$ such that every vertex in $V$ is in $S$ or adjacent to an element of $S$. Finding the domination numbers of $m$ by $n$ grids was an open problem for ne
arly 30 years and was finally solved in 2011 by Goncalves, Pinlou, Rao, and Thomasse. Many variants of domination number on graphs have been defined and studied, but exact values have not yet been obtained for grids. We will define a family of domination theories parameterized by pairs of positive integers $(t,r)$ where $1 leq r leq t$ which generalize domination and distance domination theories for graphs. We call these domination numbers the $(t,r)$ broadcast domination numbers. We give the exact values of $(t,r)$ broadcast domination numbers for small grids, and we identify upper bounds for the $(t,r)$ broadcast domination numbers for large grids and conjecture that these bounds are tight for sufficiently large grids.
