Charles Starling

Position: Part-Time Professor

Degrees: PhD Mathematics, University of Ottawa; MSc Mathematics, University of Victoria; BSc Honours in Mathematics and Physics, University of Victoria

Office: KED 306

Phone: (613) 562-5800 ext. 3507

Email: cstar050@uottawa.ca

Supervisor: Thierry Giordano

Research:

I am interested in aperiodic tilings of the plane which display long-range order. The most famous example of such a tiling is the Penrose tiling, discovererd by Roger Penrose in the 70's. The background image of this page is a patch of a tiling obtained by splitting Penrose tiles into so-called Robinson Triangles. Take a look!

From such tilings one can construct interesting topological spaces and my aim is to better understand the structure of these tilings by studying topological invariants of these spaces (specifically, the cohomology). It turns out that these invariants are closely tied to the K-theory of certain C*-algebras; this allows one to apply operator algebraic techniques to the study of tilings.

Publications

"The tiling C*-algebra viewed as a tight inverse semigroup algebra", Pre-print, 2011. arXiv, PDF
With Ruy Exel and Daniel Goncalves.
"Actions of Finite Groups on Substitution Tilings and Their Associated C*-algebras", PhD thesis, University of Ottawa 2012. PDF
"Computation of the Ruelle-Sullivan Map for Substitution Tilings", Masters thesis, University of Victoria 2005. PDF

Selected Presentations

Finite Group Actions on Substitution Tilings, Canadian Operator Symposium, May 2011. PDF
Aperiodic Substitution Tilings, University of Ottawa Grad Seminar, December 2010. PDF
Substitution Tilings and Groupoids, Fields Workshop on Semigroups and Categories, May 2010. PDF

Teaching:

In the Winter 12 semester I am teaching MAT1318B - Functions

In the Fall 11 semester I taught MAT1300E - Mathematical Methods I

In the Summer 11 semester I taught MAT1318X - Functions

In the Winter 11 semester I taught MAT1318B - Functions

In the Summer 10 semester I taught MAT1318X - Functions

In the Winter 10 semester I taught MAT1318B - Functions

In the Fall 09 semester I taught MAT1318A - Functions

In the Summer 09 semester I taught MAT1318X - Functions

In the Fall 08 semester I taught MAT1300D - Mathematical Methods I

In the Winter 08 semester I taught MAT1341D - Introduction to Linear Algebra.