Seminars Sorted by Series

Members' Colloquium

Oct
10
2022

Members' Colloquium

Yamabe flow of asymptotically flat metrics
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

In this talk, we will discuss the behavior of the Yamabe flow on an asymptotically flat (AF) manifold. We will first show the long-time existence of the Yamabe flow starting from an AF manifold and discuss the uniform estimates on manifolds with...

Oct
17
2022

Members' Colloquium

Noetherianity up to Symmetry
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Noetherianity is a fundamental property of modules, rings, and topological spaces that underlies much of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. This talk concerns algebraic structures such as the infinite-dimensional polynomial ring K[x_1,x_2...

Oct
31
2022

Members' Colloquium

Polynomials Over $\mathbb{Z}$ and $\mathbb{Q}$: Counting and Freeness
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Humans have been thinking about polynomial equations over the integers, or over the rational numbers, for many years. Despite this, their secrets are tightly locked up and it is hard to know what to expect, even in simple looking cases. In this talk...

Nov
14
2022

Members' Colloquium

Algebraic K-theory and the Cyclotomic Trace
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Projective modules over rings are the algebraic analogs of vector bundles; more precisely, they are direct summands of free modules. Some rings have non-free projective modules. For instance, the ideals of a number ring are projective, and for some...

Nov
21
2022

Members' Colloquium

Local Systems, Positivity and (Non-Commutative) Markov Numbers
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Markov numbers are positive integers that appear in solutions of the equation x^2+y^2+z^2=3xyz. They also appear naturally when one tries to parametrize positive $SL_2(R)$-local systems on a one punctured torus. In this talk I will explain that...

Nov
28
2022

Members' Colloquium

An Introduction to Random Surfaces
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

The theory of "random surfaces" has emerged in recent decades as a significant field of mathematics, lying somehow at the interface between geometry, probability, and mathematical physics. I will give a friendly (I hope) colloquium-level overview of...

Dec
05
2022

Members' Colloquium

The Other Galois Representation of an Elliptic Curve
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Let $E$ be an elliptic curve defined over $\Q$.  The $\bar\Q$-points of $E$ form an abelian group on which the Galois group $G_{\Q} = \Gal(\bar\Q/\Q)$ acts.  The usual Galois representation associated to $E$ captures the action of $G_{\Q}$ on the...

Dec
12
2022

Members' Colloquium

Varieties of Markoff Type: Arithmetic, Combinatorics, Dynamics
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

The Markoff equation $x^2+y^2+z^2=3xyz$, which arose in his spectacular thesis (1879), is ubiquitous in a tremendous variety of contexts. After reviewing some of these, we will discuss (briefly) asymptotics of integer points, and (in some detail)...

Jan
30
2023

Members' Colloquium

Closing Lemmas in Contact Dynamics and Holomorphic Curves
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Given a flow on a manifold, how to perturb it in order to create a periodic orbit passing through a given region? While the first results in this direction were obtained in the 1960-ies, various facets of this question remain largely open. I will...

Feb
06
2023

Members' Colloquium

Lefschetz Without Positivity: An Overview
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

The Lefschetz property is central in the theory of projective varieties, detailing a fundamental property of their Chow rings, essentially saying that the multiplication with a geometrically motivated class is of full rank.

We drop the keyword...

Feb
13
2023

Members' Colloquium

Floer Theories and Reeb Dynamics for Contact Manifolds
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Contact topology is the study of certain geometric structures on odd dimensional smooth manifolds. A contact structure is a hyperplane field specified by a one form which satisfies a nondegeneracy condition called maximal non-integrability. The...

Mar
06
2023

Members' Colloquium

Existence of Quasigeodesic Anosov Flows in Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

A quasigeodesic in a manifold is a curve so that when lifted to the universal cover is uniformly efficient up to a bounded multiplicative and added error in measuring length. A flow is quasigeodesic if all flow lines are quasigeodesics. We prove...

Mar
13
2023

Members' Colloquium

Almost all Collatz Orbits Attain Almost Bounded Values
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Define the Collatz map Col on the natural numbers by setting Col(n) to equal 3n+1 when n is odd and n/2 when n is even. The notorious Collatz conjecture asserts that all orbits of this map eventually attain the value 1. This remains open, even if...

Mar
20
2023

Members' Colloquium

Recent Results on Finite Group Lattice Gauge Theories
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

The rigorous study of spin systems such as the Ising model is currently one of the most active research areas in probability theory. In this talk, I will introduce one particular class of such models, known as lattice gauge theories (LGTs), and go...

Apr
03
2023

Members' Colloquium

Simple Zeros of Modular Form L-Functions
Alexandre de Faveri
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

Zeros of L-functions have been extensively studied, due to their close connection to arithmetic problems. Despite several precise conjectures about their behavior, our unconditional understanding of them remains limited. In this talk we will discuss...

Apr
10
2023

Members' Colloquium

Cohomology and arithmetic of some mapping spaces
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

How do we describe the topology of the space of all nonconstant holomorphic (respectively, algebraic) maps F: X--->Y  from one complex manifold (respectively, variety) to another? What is, for example, its cohomology? Such problems are old but...

Apr
17
2023

Members' Colloquium

Classification of Smooth Actions by Higher Rank Lattices in Critical Dimensions
2:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access - see Zoom link below

The Zimmer program asks how lattices in higher rank semisimple Lie groups may act smoothly on compact manifolds. Below a certain critical dimension, the recent proof of the Zimmer conjecture by Brown-Fisher-Hurtado asserts that, for SL(n,R) with n...

Oct
09
2023

Members' Colloquium

What is... $p$-adic geometry?
2:00pm|Simonyi 101

Let $p$ be a prime number. Roughly speaking, rigid analytic geometry is a counterpart of complex analysis where one replaces the field $\mathbf{C}$ of complex numbers by the field $\mathbf{Q}_{p}$ of $p$-adic rational numbers (or some extension...

Oct
16
2023

Members' Colloquium

Fourier Uniqueness and Nonuniqueness Pairs
Mikhail Sodin
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Motivated by a discovery by Radchenko and Viazovska and by a work by Ramos and Sousa, we find conditions sufficient for a pair of discrete subsets of the real axis to be a uniqueness or a non-uniqueness pair for the Fourier transform. These...

Oct
23
2023

Members' Colloquium

High Dimensional Variants of the Finite Field Kakeya Problem
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

The finite field Kakeya problem asks about the size of the smallest set in (F_q)^n containing a line in every direction.  Raised by Wolff in 1999 as a ‘toy’ version of the Euclidean Kakeya conjecture, this problem is now completely resolved using...

Nov
06
2023

Members' Colloquium

On the Birational Geometry of Matroids
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

The theory of matroids provides a unified abstract treatment of the concept of dependence in linear algebra and graph theory. In this talk we explain Bergman fans of matroids, and we investigate isomorphisms of Bergman fans for different fan...

Nov
20
2023

Members' Colloquium

Mass Generation By The Higgs Mechanism At All Couplings
Sourav Chatterjee
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

The Higgs mechanism is a part of the Standard Model of quantum mechanics that allows certain kinds of particles to have nonzero mass. In spite of its great importance, there is no rigorous proof that the Higgs mechanism can indeed generate mass in...

Dec
04
2023

Members' Colloquium

Einstein, P-adic Sudoku, Domino, and Decidability
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Translational tiling is a covering of a space (such as Euclidean space) using translated copies of one building block, called a "translational tile'', without any positive measure overlaps.  

Can we determine whether a given set is a translational...

Jan
29
2024

Members' Colloquium

Convergence of Unitary Representations and Spectral Gaps of Manifolds
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Let G be an infinite discrete group. Finite dimensional unitary representations of G are usually quite hard to understand. However, there are interesting notions of convergence of such representations as the dimension tends to infinity. One notion —...

Feb
05
2024

Members' Colloquium

Dynamical Asymmetry Is $C^1$-Typical
Amie Wilkinson
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Abstract: I will discuss a result with Bonatti and Crovisier from 2009 showing that the $C^1$ generic diffeomorphism f of a closed manifold has trivial centralizer; i.e. fg = gf implies that g is a power of f. I’ll discuss features of the $C^1$...

Feb
12
2024

Members' Colloquium

Conservation Laws, Traffic and Autonomy
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

The problem of control of large multi-agent systems, such as vehicular traffic, poses many challenges both for the development of mathematical models and their analysis and the application to real systems. First, we discuss how conservation laws can...

Mar
18
2024

Members' Colloquium

Sum-of-Squares Proofs, Efficient Algorithms, and Applications
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Any non-negative univariate polynomial over the reals can be written as a sum of squares.  This gives a simple-to-verify certificate of non-negativity of the polynomial. Rooted in Hilbert's 17th problem, there's now more than a century's work that...

Mar
25
2024

Members' Colloquium

Fourier Uniformity of Multiplicative Functions
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

The Fourier uniformity conjecture seeks to understand what multiplicative functions can have large Fourier coefficients on many short intervals. We will discuss recent progress on this problem and explain its connection with the distribution of...

Apr
01
2024

Members' Colloquium

On a Theorem of Furstenberg
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

A deep result of Furstenberg from 1967 states that if $\Gamma$ is a lattice in a semisimple Lie group $G$, then there exists a measure on $\Gamma$ with finite first moment such that the corresponding harmonic measure on the Furstenberg boundary of...

Apr
08
2024

Members' Colloquium

An Overview of Geometric Measure Theory, Area Minimising Currents, and Recent Progress
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Structures which minimise area appear in numerous geometric contexts often related to degeneration phenomena. In turn, in many situations these structures also reflect the ambient geometry in some way (they are ‘calibrated’) and so they may provide...

Apr
15
2024

Members' Colloquium

Recent Progress on the Problem of Compact Quotients
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

The so-called Problem of Compact Quotients asks for which homogeneous spaces G/H there exists a discrete subgroup Gamma of G such that Gamma\G/H is a compact manifold. We will discuss this problem, and describe recent progress on it arising from...

Apr
22
2024

Members' Colloquium

Algebraic K-Theory and P-Adic Arithmetic Geometry
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

To any unital, associative ring R one may associate a family of invariants known as its algebraic K-groups. Although they are essentially constructed out of simple linear algebra data over the ring, they see an extraordinary range of information...

Apr
29
2024

Members' Colloquium

Triangulated Surfaces in Moduli Space
2:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Triangulated surfaces are Riemann surfaces formed by gluing together equilateral triangles. They are also the Riemann surfaces defined over the algebraic numbers. Brooks, Makover, Mirzakhani and many others proved results about the geometric...

Sep
23
2024

Members' Colloquium

Lorentzian Polynomials, Matroids over Hyperfields, and Related Topics
1:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Lorentzian polynomials serve as a bridge between continuous and discrete convex analysis, with tropical geometry providing the critical link. The tropical connection is used to produce Lorentzian polynomials from discrete convex functions, leading...

Oct
14
2024

Members' Colloquium

Reading Alan Turing
1:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

I will discuss some well-known and less-known papers of Turing, exemplify the scope of deep, prescient ideas he put forth, and mention follow-up work on these by the Theoretical CS community.

 

No special background will be assumed.

Oct
28
2024

Members' Colloquium

New Effective Results Regarding the Oppenheim Conjecture and Polynomial Effective Equidistribution
1:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Joint work with Amir Mohammadi, Zhiren Wang, and Lei Yang

Let Q be an indefinite ternary quadratic form. In the 1980s Margulis proved the longstanding Oppenheim Conjecture, stating that unless Q is proportional to an integral form, the set of values...

Nov
04
2024

Members' Colloquium

Zeroes of Characters (cf. J.-P. Serre, same title, arXiv 2312.17551)
1:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

A promenade in Serre's paper, plus some related results of mine.

Nov
11
2024

Members' Colloquium

"Local-to-global" Theorems On High Dimensional Expanders
1:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

Expansion in graphs is a well studied topic, with a wealth of applications in many areas of mathematics and the theory of computation.

High dimensional expansion is a generalization of expansion from graphs to higher dimensional objects, such as...

Nov
25
2024

Members' Colloquium

Challenges and Breakthroughs in the Mathematics of Plasmas
1:00pm|Simonyi 101 and Remote Access

This colloquium will explore some fundamental issues in the mathematics of plasmas, focusing on the stability and instability of solutions to Vlasov-type equations, which are crucial for describing the behavior of charged particles in a plasma. A...

Members’ Seminar

Dec
06
2004

Members’ Seminar

Completing the Bernstein Program (A Geometric Conjecture within the Representation Theory of p-adic Groups)
4:00pm|S-101
Jan
31
2005

Members’ Seminar

Approximation algorithms and Grothendieck type inequalities
4:00pm|S-101

I will describe a connection between a classical inequality of Grothendieck and approximation algorithms based on semi-definite programming. The investigation of this connection suggests the definition of a new graph parameter, called the...

Feb
14
2005

Members’ Seminar

Blow up in a 3-D "toy" model for the Euler equations
4:00pm|S-101

We present a 3-D vector dyadic model given in terms of an infinite system of nonlinearly coupled ODE. This toy model is inspired by approximations to the fluid equations studied by Dinaburg and Sinai. The model has structural similarities with the...

Feb
22
2005

Members’ Seminar

A New Characterization of Sobolev Spaces
3:00pm|S-101

This talk is motivated by some recent work of Bourgain- rezis-Mironescu. A few years ago, they introduced an elementary way of defining the Sobolev spaces $W^{1,p}$ without making any use of derivatives. I will present their definition and some...