Combinatorial Space Tiling

The present article studies combinatorial tilings of Euclidean or spherical spaces by polytopes, serving two main purposes: first, to survey some of the main developments in combinatorial space tiling; and second, to highlight some new and some old open problems in this area.Comment: 16 pages; to appear in "Symmetry: Culture and Science

Different facets of the raise and peel model

The raise and peel model is a one-dimensional stochastic model of a fluctuating interface with nonlocal interactions. This is an interesting physical model. It's phase diagram has a massive phase and a gapless phase with varying critical exponents. At the phase transition point, the model exhibits conformal invariance which is a space-time symmetry. Also at this point the model has several other facets which are the connections to associative algebras, two-dimensional fully packed loop models and combinatorics.Comment: 29 pages 17 figure