Members’ Colloquium

Persistence modules and their associated barcodes were intensively studied since the early 2000s with a view towards applied mathematics. Recently they have also found numerous applications in pure mathematics. We will discuss a few examples from...

Selmer groups are a cohomological tool used to reduce the task of finding solutions of certain diophantine equations to easier field and modular arithmetic. I'll explain how this works in down to earth terms and give some concrete applications...

Hel Braun (IAS member 1947-1948) was a mathematician who introduced approaches that continue to impact research today.  Braun's research contributions lie in three areas: classical number theory problems about integers, modular and automorphic forms...

Originally introduced as analogs of symmetric spaces for  groups over non-archimedian fields buildings have proven useful in various areas by now. In this talk I will introduce (Bruhat-Tits) buildings,  combinatorial toolkits to study them and their...

Erd\H{o}s unit distance problem asks the following: Let P

be a set of n distinct points in the plane, and let U(P)

denote the number of pairs of points in P that are at distance 1. How large can U(P) be? In 1946, Erd\H{o}s showed that for P=[n‾√]×[n‾√...

In their 1971 study of telephone switching circuitry, Graham and Pollak designed a novel addressing scheme that was better suited for the faster communication required by computers. They introduced the distance matrix of a graph, and used its...

The Prékopa-Leindler inequality (PL) and its strengthening, the Borell-Brascamp-Lieb inequality, are functional extensions of the Brunn-Minkowski inequality from convex geometry, which itself refines the classical isoperimetric inequality. These...

In the late 1800s, in the course of his study of classical problems of number theory, the young Hermann Minkowski discovered the importance of a new kind of geometric object that we now call a convex set. He soon developed a rich theory for...

The Poisson-Furstenberg boundary  is a measure space that describes asymptotics of infinite trajectories of random walks. The boundary is non-trivial if and only if the defining  measure admits non-constant bounded harmonic functions.

The origin of...

We travel the years in order to understand the relationship between Nilpotency and Riemannian geometry: including Gromov's almost flat theorem for manifolds with bounded curvature and Fukaya-Yamaguchi's almost nilpotency of spaces with lower...