Colloquia/Fall18

Mathematics Colloquium

All colloquia are on Fridays at 4:00 pm in Van Vleck B239, unless otherwise indicated.

Fall 2016

date	speaker	title	host(s)
September 9
September 16	Po-Shen Loh (CMU)	Directed paths: from Ramsey to Pseudorandomness	Ellenberg
September 23	Gheorghe Craciun (UW-Madison)	Toric Differential Inclusions and a Proof of the Global Attractor Conjecture	Street
September 30	Akos Magyar (University of Georgia)	Geometric Ramsey theory	Cook
October 7
October 14	Ling Long (LSU)	Hypergeometric functions over finite fields	Yang
October 21	No colloquium this week
Tuesday, October 25, 9th floor	Stefan Steinerberger (Yale)	Three Miracles in Analysis	Seeger
October 28, 9th floor	Linda Reichl (UT Austin)	Microscopic hydrodynamic modes in a binary mixture	Minh-Binh Tran
Monday, October 31, B239	Kathryn Mann (Berkeley)	Groups acting on the circle	Smith
November 4
Monday, November 7 at 4:30, 9th floor (AMS Maclaurin lecture)	Gaven Martin (New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study)	Siegel's problem on small volume lattices	Marshall
November 11	Reserved for possible job talks
Wednesday, November 16, 9th floor	Kathryn Lindsey (U Chicago)	Shapes of Julia Sets	Michell
November 18, B239	Andrew Snowden (University of Michigan)	Recent progress in representation stability	Ellenberg
Monday, November 21, 9th floor	Mariya Soskova (University of Wisconsin-Madison)	Definability in degree structures	Smith
November 25	Thanksgiving break
December 2, 9th floor	Hao Shen (Columbia)	Singular Stochastic Partial Differential Equations - How do they arise and what do they mean?	Roch
Monday, December 5, B239	Botong Wang (UW Madison)	Enumeration of points, lines, planes, etc.	Maxim
December 9, B239	Aaron Brown (U Chicago)	Lattice actions and recent progress in the Zimmer program	Kent
Monday, December 19, B115	Andrew Zimmer (U Chicago)	Metric spaces of non-positive curvature and applications in several complex variables	Gong

Spring 2017

date	speaker	title	host(s)
Monday, January 9, 9th floor	Miklos Racz (Microsoft)	Statistical inference in networks and genomics	Valko
January 13, B239	Mihaela Ifrim (Berkeley)	Two dimensional water waves	Angenent
Tuesday, January 17, B139	Fabio Pusateri (Princeton)	The Water Waves problem	Angenent
January 20	Sam Raskin (MIT)	Tempered local geometric Langlands	Arinkin
Monday, January 23, B239	Tamas Darvas (Maryland)	Geometry on the space of Kahler metrics and applications to canonical metrics	Viaclovsky
January 27	Reserved for possible job talks
February 3		TBA
February 6 (Wasow lecture)	Benoit Perthame (University of Paris VI)	TBA	Jin
February 10 (WIMAW lecture)	Alina Chertock (NC State Univ.)		WIMAW
February 17	Gustavo Ponce (UCSB)		Minh-Binh Tran
February 24
March 3	Ken Bromberg (University of Utah)		Dymarz
Tuesday, March 7, 4PM (Distinguished Lecture)	Roger Temam (Indiana University)		Smith
Wednesday, March 8, 2:25PM	Roger Temam (Indiana University)		Smith
March 10	No Colloquium
Wednesday, March 15, 4PM	Enrique Zuazua (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)	TBA	Jin & Minh-Binh Tran
March 17	Lillian Pierce (Duke University)	TBA	M. Matchett Wood
March 24	Spring Break
Wednesday, March 29 (Wasow)	Sylvia Serfaty (NYU)	TBA	Tran
March 31	No Colloquium
April 7	Hal Schenck		Erman
April 14	Wilfrid Gangbo		Feldman & Tran
April 21	Mark Andrea de Cataldo (Stony Brook)	TBA	Maxim
April 28	Thomas Yizhao Hou	TBA	Li

Abstracts

September 16: Po-Shen Loh (CMU)

Title: Directed paths: from Ramsey to Pseudorandomness

Abstract: Starting from an innocent Ramsey-theoretic question regarding directed paths in graphs, we discover a series of rich and surprising connections that lead into the theory around a fundamental result in Combinatorics: Szemeredi's Regularity Lemma, which roughly states that every graph (no matter how large) can be well-approximated by a bounded-complexity pseudorandom object. Using these relationships, we prove that every coloring of the edges of the transitive N-vertex tournament using three colors contains a directed path of length at least sqrt(N) e^{log^* N} which entirely avoids some color. The unusual function log^* is the inverse function of the tower function (iterated exponentiation).

September 23: Gheorghe Craciun (UW-Madison)

Title: Toric Differential Inclusions and a Proof of the Global Attractor Conjecture

Abstract: The Global Attractor Conjecture says that a large class of polynomial dynamical systems, called toric dynamical systems, have a globally attracting point within each linear invariant space. In particular, these polynomial dynamical systems never exhibit multistability, oscillations or chaotic dynamics.

The conjecture was formulated by Fritz Horn in the early 1970s, and is strongly related to Boltzmann's H-theorem.

We discuss the history of this problem, including the connection between this conjecture and the Boltzmann equation. Then, we introduce toric differential inclusions, and describe how they can be used to prove this conjecture in full generality.

September 30: Akos Magyar (University of Georgia)

Title: Geometric Ramsey theory

Abstract: Initiated by Erdos, Graham, Montgomery and others in the 1970's, geometric Ramsey theory studies geometric configurations, determined up to translations, rotations and possibly dilations, which cannot be destroyed by finite partitions of Euclidean spaces. Later it was shown by ergodic and Fourier analytic methods that such results are also possible in the context of sets of positive upper density in Euclidean spaces or the integer lattice. We present a new approach, motivated by developments in arithmetic combinatorics, which provide new results as well new proofs of some classical results in this area.

October 14: Ling Long (LSU)

Title: Hypergeometric functions over finite fields

Abstract: Hypergeometric functions are special functions with lot of symmetries. In this talk, we will introduce hypergeometric functions over finite fields, originally due to Greene, Katz and McCarthy, in a way that is parallel to the classical hypergeometric functions, and discuss their properties and applications to character sums and the arithmetic of hypergeometric abelian varieties. This is a joint work with Jenny Fuselier, Ravi Ramakrishna, Holly Swisher, and Fang-Ting Tu.

Tuesday, October 25, 9th floor: Stefan Steinerberger (Yale)

Title: Three Miracles in Analysis

Abstract: I plan to tell three stories: all deal with new points of view on very classical objects and have in common that there is a miracle somewhere. Miracles are nice but difficult to reproduce, so in all three cases the full extent of the underlying theory is not clear and many interesting open problems await. (1) An improvement of the Poincare inequality on the Torus that encodes a lot of classical Number Theory. (2) If the Hardy-Littlewood maximal function is easy to compute, then the function is sin(x). (Here, the miracle is both in the statement and in the proof). (3) Bounding classical integral operators (Hilbert/Laplace/Fourier-transforms) in L^2 -- but this time from below (this problem originally arose in medical imaging). Here, the miracle is also known as 'Slepian's miracle' (this part is joint work with Rima Alaifari, Lillian Pierce and Roy Lederman).

October 28: Linda Reichl (UT Austin)

Title: Microscopic hydrodynamic modes in a binary mixture

Abstract: Expressions for propagation speeds and decay rates of hydrodynamic modes in a binary mixture can be obtained directly from spectral properties of the Boltzmann equations describing the mixture. The derivation of hydrodynamic behavior from the spectral properties of the kinetic equation provides an alternative to Chapman-Enskog theory, and removes the need for lengthy calculations of transport coefficients in the mixture. It also provides a sensitive test of the completeness of kinetic equations describing the mixture. We apply the method to a hard-sphere binary mixture and show that it gives excellent agreement with light scattering experiments on noble gas mixtures.

Monday, October 31: Kathryn Mann (Berkeley)

Title: Groups acting on the circle

Abstract: Given a group G and a manifold M, can one describe all the actions of G on M? This is a basic and natural question from geometric topology, but also a very difficult one -- even in the case where M is the circle, and G is a familiar, finitely generated group.

In this talk, I’ll introduce you to the theory of groups acting on the circle, building on the perspectives of Ghys, Calegari, Goldman and others. We'll see some tools, old and new, some open problems, and some connections between this theory and themes in topology (like foliated bundles) and dynamics.

November 7: Gaven Martin (New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study)

Title: Siegel's problem on small volume lattices

Abstract: We outline in very general terms the history and the proof of the identification of the minimal covolume lattice of hyperbolic 3-space as the 3-5-3 Coxeter group extended by the involution preserving the symmetry of this diagram. This gives us the smallest regular tessellation of hyperbolic 3-space. This solves (in three dimensions) a problem posed by Siegel in 1945. Siegel solved this problem in two dimensions by deriving the signature formula identifying the (2,3,7)-triangle group as having minimal co-area.

There are strong connections with arithmetic hyperbolic geometry in the proof, and the result has applications in the maximal symmetry groups of hyperbolic 3-manifolds in much the same way that Hurwitz's 84g-84 theorem and Siegel's result do.

Wednesday, November 16 (9th floor): Kathryn Lindsey (U Chicago)

Title: Shapes of Julia Sets

Abstract: The filled Julia set of a complex polynomial P is the set of points whose orbit under iteration of the map P is bounded. William Thurston asked "What are the possible shapes of polynomial Julia sets?" For example, is there a polynomial whose Julia set looks like a cat, or your silhouette, or spells out your name? It turns out the answer to all of these is "yes!" I will characterize the shapes of polynomial Julia sets and present an algorithm for constructing polynomials whose Julia sets have desired shapes.

November 18: Andrew Snowden (University of Michigan)

Title: Recent progress in representation stability

Abstract: Representation stability is a relatively new field that studies somewhat exotic algebraic structures and exploits their properties to prove results (often asymptotic in nature) about objects of interest. I will describe some of the algebraic structures that appear (and state some important results about them), give a sampling of some notable applications (in group theory, topology, and algebraic geometry), and mention some open problems in the area.

Monday, November 21: Mariya Soskova (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Title: Definability in degree structures

Abstract: Some incomputable sets are more incomputable than others. We use Turing reducibility and enumeration reducibility to measure the relative complexity of incomputable sets. By identifying sets of the same complexity, we can associate to each reducibility a degree structure: the partial order of the Turing degrees and the partial order of the enumeration degrees. The two structures are related in nontrivial ways. The first has an isomorphic copy in the second and this isomorphic copy is an automorphism base. In 1969, Rogers asked a series of questions about the two degree structures with a common theme: definability. In this talk I will introduce the main concepts and describe the work that was motivated by these questions.

Friday, December 2: Hao Shen (Columbia)

Title: Singular Stochastic Partial Differential Equations - How do they arise and what do they mean?

Abstract: Systems with random fluctuations are ubiquitous in the real world. Stochastic PDEs are default models for these random systems, just as PDEs are default models for deterministic systems. However, a large class of such stochastic PDEs were poorly understood until very recently: the presence of very singular random forcing as well as nonlinearities render it challenging to interpret what one even means by a ``solution". The recent breakthroughs by M. Hairer, M. Gubinelli and other researchers including the speaker not only established solution theories for these singular SPDEs, but also led to an explosion of new questions. These include scaling limits of random microscopic models, development of numerical schemes, ergodicity of random dynamical systems and a new approach to quantum field theory. In this talk we will discuss the main ideas of the recent solution theories of singular SPDEs, and how these SPDEs arise as limits of various important physical models.

Monday, December 5: Botong Wang (UW-Madison)

Title: Enumeration of points, lines, planes, etc.

Abstract: It is a theorem of de Bruijn and Erdos that n points in the plane determine at least n lines, unless all the points lie on a line. This is one of the earliest results in enumerative combinatorial geometry. We will present a higher dimensional generalization of this theorem, which confirms a “top-heavy” conjecture of Dowling and Wilson in 1975. I will give a sketch of the key ideas of the proof, which are the hard Lefschetz theorem and the decomposition theorem in algebraic geometry. I will also talk about a log-concave conjecture on the number of independent sets. These are joint works with June Huh.

Friday, December 9: Aaron Brown (U Chicago)

Lattice actions and recent progress in the Zimmer program

Abstract: The Zimmer Program is a collection of conjectures and questions regarding actions of lattices in higher-rank simple Lie groups on compact manifolds. For instance, it is conjectured that all non-trivial volume-preserving actions are built from algebraic examples using standard constructions. In particular—on manifolds whose dimension is below the dimension of all algebraic examples—Zimmer’s conjecture asserts that every action is finite.

I will present some background, motivation, and selected previous results in the Zimmer program. I will then explain two of my results within the Zimmer program: (1) a solution to Zimmer’s conjecture for actions of cocompact lattices in SL(n,R) (joint with D. Fisher and S. Hurtado); (2) a classification (up to topological semiconjugacy) of all actions on tori whose induced action on homology satisfies certain criteria (joint with F. Rodriguez Hertz and Z. Wang).

Monday, December 19: Andrew Zimmer (U Chicago)

Metric spaces of non-positive curvature and applications in several complex variables

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss how to use ideas from the theory of metric spaces of non-positive curvature to understand the behavior of holomorphic maps between bounded domains in complex Euclidean space. Every bounded domain has an metric, called the Kobayashi metric, which is distance non-increasing with respect to holomorphic maps. Moreover, this metric often satisfies well-known non-positive curvature type conditions (for instance, Gromov hyperbolicity or visibility) and one can then use these conditions to understand the behavior of holomorphic maps. Some of what I will talk about is joint work with Gautam Bharali.

Monday, January 9: Miklos Racz (Microsoft)

Statistical inference in networks and genomics

Abstract: From networks to genomics, large amounts of data are increasingly available and play critical roles in helping us understand complex systems. Statistical inference is crucial in discovering the underlying structures present in these systems, whether this concerns the time evolution of a network, an underlying geometric structure, or reconstructing a DNA sequence from partial and noisy information. In this talk I will discuss several fundamental detection and estimation problems in these areas.

I will present an overview of recent developments in source detection and estimation in randomly growing graphs. For example, can one detect the influence of the initial seed graph? How good are root-finding algorithms? I will also discuss inference in random geometric graphs: can one detect and estimate an underlying high-dimensional geometric structure? Finally, I will discuss statistical error correction algorithms for DNA sequencing that are motivated by DNA storage, which aims to use synthetic DNA as a high-density, durable, and easy-to-manipulate storage medium of digital data.

Friday, January 13: Mihaela Ifrim (Berkeley)

Two dimensional water waves

The classical water-wave problem consists of solving the Euler equations in the presence of a free fluid surface (e.g the water-air interface). This talk will provide an overview of recent developments concerning the motion of a two dimensional incompressible fluid with a free surface. There is a wide range of problems that fall under the heading of water waves, depending on a number of assumptions that can be applied: surface tension, gravity, finite bottom, infinite bottom, rough bottom, etc., and combinations thereof. We will present the physical motivation for studying such problems, followed by the discussion of several interesting mathematical questions related to them. The first step in the analysis is the choice of coordinates, where multiple choices are available. Once the equations are derived we will discuss the main issues arising when analysing local well-posedness, as well as the long time behaviour of solutions with small, or small and localized data. In the last part of the talk we will introduce a new, very robust method which allows one to obtain enhanced lifespan bounds for the solutions. If time permits we will also introduce an alternative method to the scattering theory, which in some cases yields a straightforward route to proving global existence results and obtaining an asymptotic description of solutions. This is joint work with Daniel Tataru, and in part with John Hunter.

Tuesday, January 17: Fabio Pusateri (Princeton)

The Water Waves problem

We will begin by introducing the free boundary Euler equations which are a system of nonlinear PDEs modeling the motion of fluids, such as waves on the surface of the ocean. We will discuss several works done on this system in recent years, and how they fit into the broader context of the study of nonlinear evolution problems. We will then focus on the question of global regularity for water waves, present some of our main results - obtained in collaboration with Ionescu and Deng-Ionescu-Pausader - and sketch some of the main ideas.

Friday, January 20: Sam Raskin (MIT)

Tempered local geometric Langlands

The (arithmetic) Langlands program is a cornerstone of modern representation theory and number theory. It has two incarnations: local and global. The former conjectures the existence of certain "local terms," and the latter predicts remarkable interactions between these local terms. By necessity, the global story is predicated on the local.

Geometric Langlands attempts to find similar patterns in the geometry of curves. However, the scope of the subject has been limited by a meager local theory, which has not been adequately explored.

The subject of this talk is a part of a larger investigation into local geometric Langlands. We will give an elementary overview of the expectations of this theory, discuss a certain concrete conjecture in the area (on "temperedness"), and provide evidence for this conjecture.

Monday, January 23: Tamas Darvas (Maryland)

Geometry on the space of Kahler metrics and applications to canonical metrics

A basic problem in Kahler geometry, going back to Calabi in the 50's, is to find Kahler metrics with the best curvature properties, e.g., Einstein metrics. Such special metrics are minimizers of well known functionals on the space of all Kahler metrics H. However these functionals become convex only if an adequate geometry is chosen on H. One such choice of Riemannian geometry was proposed by Mabuchi in the 80's, and was used to address a number of uniqueness questions in the theory. In this talk I will present more general Finsler geometries on H, that still enjoy many of the  properties that Mabuchi's geometry has, and I will give applications related to existence of special Kahler metrics, including the recent resolution of Tian's related properness conjectures. 

Past Colloquia

Spring 2016

Fall 2015

Spring 2015

Fall 2014

Spring 2014

Fall 2013

Spring 2013

Fall 2012