Alejandro Erickson

These documents describe my academic experience.

Various research projects I am working on or have worked on.

I have begun to learn flash so that I can animate certain combinatorial objects and games.

Traditionally, a tatami mat is made from a rice straw core, with a covering of woven soft rush straw. Originally intended for nobility in Japan. The typical tatami mat occurs in a 1 × 2 aspect ratio and various configurations of them are used to cover floors in houses and temples. By parity considerations it may be necessary to introduce mats with a 1×1 aspect ratio in order to cover the floor of a room. Such a covering is said to be “auspicious” if no four corners of mats meet at a point.

We have discovered that not only are tatami mat arrangements mathematically rich, they have considerable structure that is fun to play with and generates new questions.