Members Seminar

A key result in spectral theory linking classical and quantum mechanics is the Quantum Ergodicity theorem, which states that in a system in which the classical is ergodic, almost all of the Laplace eigenfunctions become uniformly distributed in...

I'll review recent progress on properties of 3-manifold groups, especially following from geometric properties. Then I'll discuss some open questions regarding 3-manifold groups, including their profinite completions, torsion in covers, orderability...

The Torelli map associates to a genus g curve its Jacobian - a $g$-dimensional principally polarized abelian variety. It turns out, by the works of Mumford and Namikawa in the 1970s (resp. Alexeev and Brunyate in 2010s), that the Torelli map extends...

The data of a compact Lie group $G$ and a degree 4 cohomology class on its classifying space leads to invariants in low-dimensional topology as well as important representations of the infinite dimensional group of loops in $G$. Previous work with...

Algebraic cycles are linear combinations of algebraic subvarieties of an algebraic variety. We want to know whether all algebraic subvarieties can be built from finitely many, in a suitable sense. We present some recent results and counterexamples.

Ball quotients are complex manifolds appearing in many different settings: algebraic geometry, hyperbolic geometry, group theory and number theory. I will describe various results and conjectures on them.

The study of Cayley graphs of finite groups is related to the investigation of pseudo-random graphs and to problems in Combinatorial Number Theory, Geometry and Information Theory. I will discuss this topic, describing the motivation and focusing on...

Start with a compact Riemann surface \(X\) and a complex reductive group \(G\), like \(\mathrm{GL}(n,\mathbb C)\). According to Hitchin-Simpson's ``non abelian Hodge theory", the pair \((X,G)\) comes with two new complex manifolds: the character...

Groups are Gromov-hyperbolic when all geodesic triangles in their Cayley graphs are close to being tripods. Despite being tree-like in this manner, they can harbour extreme wildness in their subgroups. I will describe examples stemming from a re...

Shot-noise random fields can model a lot of different phenomena that can be described as the additive contributions of randomly distributed points. In the first part of the talk, I will give some properties of these random fields. And in a second...