The math and physics of Project scheduling (part 2)

(This talk will be the second part of the Colloquium-Lecture the same week)

We will survey basic tools of project scheduling including Gannt charts, CPM and PERT. We will then consider a new point of view that takes into account the different resources that different potential contractors may have when scheduling the same project. We will also consider the aspects of policies for many similar projects. We will do so taking into account only operational considerations. Nonetheless, we will show that this purely application driven approach can lead to a lot of interesting and diverse mathematics and physics including enumerative combinatorics, Lorentzian geometry, Kardar-Parisi-Zhang processes (Integrable probability) and wave propagation in hyperbolic media. The talk will be self contained.