Andrés R. Vindas Meléndez
Note: Professor Vindas Meléndez will start in the fall of the 2024-2025 academic year.
Andrés R. Vindas Meléndez, PhD, is a Costa Rican-American mathematician, raised in Lynwood, South East Los Ángeles, California. Vindas Meléndez is a first-generation college graduate and is currently an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. Previously, he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow & Lecturer at UC Berkeley and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute [MSRI] (now the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute [SLMath]). He has also been a research member for the SLMath Fall 2023 program on Algorithms, Fairness, & Equity and a research scholar at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research Mathematics [ICERM] for the program on Data Science & Social Justice: Networks, Policy, & Education during the Summers of 2022 and 2023.
Vindas Meléndez completed his PhD at the University of Kentucky where he also earned a graduate certificate in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. Before that, he earned his master’s degree in mathematics from San Francisco State University and undergraduate mathematics degree from UC Berkeley where he also minored in Philosophy and Chicanx & Latinx Studies.
His research interests are in algebraic, enumerative, and geometric combinatorics. His scholarly interests have also expanded to include mathematical & computational approaches and applications of data science and mathematics for social justice.
Vindas Meléndez strives to create community in order to build mathematics users’ confidence in spite of society’s negative messages and stigma about mathematics. He also aims to build meaningful and empowering experiences with mathematics, while also challenging others to think about the power structures that are present in and outside mathematical spaces.
Mathematical Interests:
- Triangulations, subdivisions, and volume of lattice and rational polytopes and cones.
- Ehrhart theory: (local) h*-polynomials, quasi-polynomials, Equivariant Ehrhart theory, Ehrhart positivity.
- Catalan Combinatorics: generating functions, trees, standard Young tableaux, integer partitions, q-analogs, Dyck paths, generalizations of parking functions, Narayana numbers.
- Combinatorics of Posets: lattices, chains, order ideals, rank generating functions, meet-irreducibles.
- Geometric combinatorics: matroids, hyperplane arrangements, symmetry.
- Polynomial properties: real-rootedness, gamma-positivity, symmetric decompositions.
- Symmetric functions: chromatic symmetric functions, q- and q,t-analogs.
- Critical group of graphs and chip-firing.
- Data science and mathematics for social justice: data analysis, interdisciplinary study (e.g., social science, history, economics), and racial/social issues.