Video Lectures

A cusp singularity is an isolated surface singularity whose minimal resolution is a cycle of smooth rational curves meeting transversely. Cusp singularities come in naturally dual pairs. In the 1980's Looijenga conjectured that a cusp singularity is...

In 1991 a new type of transfer to the Moon was operationally demonstrated by the Japanese spacecraft, Hiten, using ballistic capture. It was designed by this speaker and James Miller. This is capture about the Moon which is automatic so that no...

The aim of this talk is to study a class of singularities of moduli spaces of sheaves on K3 surfaces by means of Nakajima quiver varieties. The singularities in question arise from the choice of a non generic polarization, with respect to which we...

In profoundly influential works, Shannon and Huffman show that if Alice wants to send a message \(X\) to Bob, it's sufficient for her to send roughly \(H(X)\) bits (in expectation), where \(H\) denotes Shannon's entropy function. In other words, the...

After introducing an elementary criterion for a real number to be irrational, I will discuss Apery's famous result proving the irrationality of \(\zeta(3)\). Then I will give an overview of subsequent results in this field, and finally propose a...

The Qurʾān defines itself as the last, perfect link in a chain of progressive divine revelations. This determines the ambivalent attitude of the Qurʾān and the Muslim tradition towards the two earlier monotheistic religions: Judaism and Christianity...

ECH (embedded contact homology) capacities give obstructions to symplectically embedding one four-dimensional symplectic manifold with boundary into another. These obstructions are known to be sharp when the domain is a "concave toric domain" and...

Embedded contact homology gives a sequence of obstructions to four-dimensional symplectic embeddings, called ECH capacities. These obstructions are known to be sharp in several interesting cases, for example for symplectic embeddings of one...