Events - 2020

Jiuya Wang, Duke University

"The Distribution of Class Groups of Number Fields"

Class group is a central object of the study in number theory. We will give an overview on new developments in the distribution of class groups with a fixed Galois group. In particular, we will explain the use of symmetry which has been overlooked for decades, but turns out to be an essential tool to obtain many new results on the distribution of class groups.

A post-colloquium meet and greet will be held at 2:00 pm using the same Zoom meeting link.

Alex Weekes, University of British Columbia

"Nilpotent orbits and affine Grassmannians"

Mani Thamizhazhagan, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"On the interplay of harmonic analysis, combinatorics, additive number theory and ergodic theory"

Sherry Gong, Stanford University

"Invariants of knots and links"

We give an overview of some invariants to distinguish knots and links, and discuss some particular algebraic and geometric invariants. We discuss how these invariants relate to the smooth 4-dimensional Poincare conjecture, one of the most important questions in 4-manifold topology.

A post-colloquium meet and greet will be held at 2:00 pm using the same Zoom meeting link.

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"