Events - 2020

Elana Kalashnikov, Harvard University

"Quiver flag varieties and mirror symmetry"

Jonathan Zhu, Princeton

"Mean curvature flow and explicit Łojasiewicz inequalities"

Michael Brannan, Texas A&M University

"Quantum symmetries of graphs"

Lei Alice Chen, California Institute of Technology

"Actions of Homeo and Diffeo groups on manifolds"

In this talk, I discuss the general question of how to obstruct and construct group actions on manifolds. I will focus on large groups like Homeo(M) and Diff(M) about how they can act on another manifold N. The main result is an orbit classification theorem, which fully classifies possible orbits. I will also talk about some low dimensional applications and open questions. This is a joint work with Kathryn Mann.

Gigliola Staffilani, MIT

"The many faces of dispersive equations"

Seda Albayrak, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Sparse Automatic Sets"

I will present results in the theory of sparse automatic sets in three different contexts: the theory of algebraic power series, unlikely intersections, and the theory of representations in additive bases.

Online

Chris Sangwin, University of Edinburgh

"Assessing students' proofs online"

In this seminar I will describe how we, at the University of Edinburgh, have tried to help students learn proof through online assessment. This is ongoing work, driven by a practical need and constrained by current technology which cannot automatically assess students' free form proof. The seminar will discuss the nature of elementary proof more generally.

Seda Albayrak, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"A refinement of Christol’s theorem"

Niky Kamran, McGill University

"Non-uniqueness for the anisotropic Calderon problem"

Seda Albayrak, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"A Strong version of Cobham’s theorem"

Chao Li, Princeton University

"Geometric comparison theorems for scalar curvature lower bounds"

Adam Humeniuk, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Generatingfunctionology: basics and approximation"

A generating function is a device for studying a sequence by trapping it in the coefficients of a power series. I'll give a brief crash course on "generatingfunctionology", and show you how to write down the generating function of Fibonacci numbers. This gives, for instance, an exact formula for the nth Fibonacci number. We don’t usually care whether the series converges, and work in the setting of “formal” power series.