"A partition of an integer is simply a way of expressing an integer as a sum of positive integers where the order of the summands is considered irrelevant. For example, there are three different partitions of the number three: 1+1+1, 2+1, 3 itself.
  Despite the simplicity of this concept, it turns out that sophisticated techniques are required to study many aspects of partitions, and partition have had applications to many different areas of mathematics as well as physics and computer science. I plan to discuss various elementary aspects of the theory of partitions, with an emphasis on highlighting historical figures associated with milestone achievements in the subject"

  Professor Andrew Sills is a local. He grew up in East Brunswick and earned his B.A. with honors from Rutgers College. After two years of working as an actuarial assistant in New York, he returned to academia and earned an M.A. in math from Penn State and a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Kentucky in 2002. He is now a Hill Assistant Professor in the mathematics department at Rutgers.  His research interests include integer partitions, hypergeometric series and their generalizations including q-series, and symbolic computation. To date, he has nine scholarly papers accepted for publication in various academic journals.