Seminar

Title: What do graph planarity and homomorphism counts have to do with quantum mechanics?

Abstract:

I will introduce the notion of quantum isomorphisms of graphs. These are defined in terms of a game in which two cooperating players attempt to convince a referee that two given graphs are isomorphic.

Title: Constructing broken SIDH parameters: a tale of De Feo, Jao, and Plut's serendipity.

Abstract:

This talk is motivated by analyzing the security of the cryptographic key exchange protocol SIDH (Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman), introduced by 2011 by De Feo, Jao, and Plut. We will first recall some mathematical background as well as the protocol itself. The 'keys' in this protocol are elliptic curves, which are typically described by equations in x and y of the form y^2 = x^3 + ax + b. Of importance in this talk will be 'endomorphisms' associated to elliptic curves: these are functions that map an elliptic curve to itself which also satisfy some nice properties.

Title: An Algorithmic Reduction Theory for Binary Codes: LLL and more

Joint work with Thomas Debris-Alazard and Wessel van Woerden

Abstract:

Lattice reduction is the task of finding a basis of short and somewhat orthogonal vectors of a given lattice. In 1985 Lenstra, Lenstra and Lovasz proposed a polynomial time algorithm for this task, with an application to factoring rational polynomials. Since then, the LLL algorithm has found countless application in algorithmic number theory and in cryptanalysis.

Title: Subdivergence-free gluings of trees

Abstract:

Motivated by questions in quantum field theory, we introduce a purely combinatorial problem of counting subdivergence-free gluings of trees. We present closed-form expressions counting subdivergence-free gluings for four different families of trees, as well as an algorithm to count subdivergence-free gluings of arbitrary pairs of trees. This is joint work with Clair Dai and Karen Yeats.

Title: Counting the $c_2$ invariant on the circulant family of graphs

Abstract:

The algebro-geometric invariant on Feynman Diagrams called the $c_2$ invariant is a useful tool for detecting properties of Feynman periods. We present this identity on graphs that originate from the scalar $\phi_4$-theory with a purely combinatorial perspective and go over some strategies for computing it. We will further narrow our focus onto the circulant family of graphs and present some explicit results.

Title: Abelian covering graphs and their properties

Abstract:

 A covering graph is a structure obtained from a graph by ‘replacing’ every vertex with a coclique of size $r$. The main focus of this talk is connections between (spectral) characteristic of a cover and properties such as being walk- or distance- regular.

Title: Decomposing discrete quantum walks into continuous quantum walks

Abstract:

The Grover walk is a discrete quantum walk inspired by Grover's search algorithm. It takes place on the arcs of a graph, and alternates between "coin flips" and "arc reversal". In this talk, I show that for a distance regular graph X with diameter d and intertible A(X), the Grover walk on X can be "decomposed" into at most d "commuting" continuous quantum walks.

Title: P\'olya enumeration theorems in algebraic geometry

Abstract:

We will start by comparing Macdonald's formula of the generating function for the symmetric powers of a compact complex manifold and Grothendieck's formula of the zeta series of a projective variety over a finite field, an explicit version of Dwork's rationality result.

Title: Weighted Maximum Multicommodity Flows over time

Abstract:

In various applications, flow does not travel instantaneously through a network, and the amount of flow traveling on an edge may vary over time. This temporal dimension is not captured by the classic static network flow models but can be modeled using flows over time. 

Title: Continuous Quantum Walks on Graphs

Abstract:

A quantum walk is a (rather imperfect analog) of a random walk on a graph. They can be viewed as gadgets that might play a role in quantum computers, and have been used to produce algorithms that outperform corresponding classical procedures.