Mathematics Colloquium: Quads: A SET-like Game with a Twist, with Lauren Bard 11/19

11/14/2025
By Joris Roos

The Department of Mathematics & Statistics invites you to attend a colloquium lecture by Lauren Bard, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Bard College, on Wednesday, Nov. 19.

Title: Quads: A SET-like Game with a twist
Time: 11 a.m. to noon
Room: Southwick 350W

Everyone is welcome!

Abstract: Quads is a SET-like card game published as EvenQuads by the AWM. The goal of the game is to find “quads”, which are sets of four cards satisfying a particular pattern. The cards can be viewed as points in the finite affine geometry AG(6,2), and a quad in the card game corresponds to a plane in AG(6,2). We are particularly interested in collections of cards that don’t contain a quad. We will describe a Quads analog to the "Cap Set problem" for SET, and discuss known results. In particular, we address the question of how many cards you must lay out to guarantee a quad.

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