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The calendar for spring 2019 can be found [[Colloquia/Spring2019|here]].
The calendar for spring 2019 can be found [[Colloquia/Spring2019|here]].


== Fall 2018 ==
==Spring 2019==
 


{| cellpadding="8"
{| cellpadding="8"
Line 14: Line 13:
!align="left" | host(s)
!align="left" | host(s)
|-
|-
|Sep 12    '''Room 911'''
|Jan 25
| [https://sites.math.washington.edu/~gunther/ Gunther Uhlmann] (Univ. of Washington) Distinguished Lecture series
| [http://www.users.miamioh.edu/randrib/ Beata Randrianantoanina] (Miami University Ohio) WIMAW
|[[#Sep 12: Gunther Uhlmann (Univ. of Washington)|  Harry Potter's Cloak via Transformation Optics ]]
|[[#Beata Randrianantoanina (Miami University Ohio) |  Some nonlinear problems in the geometry of Banach spaces and their applications  ]]
| Li
| Tullia Dymarz
|
|-
|Jan 30 '''Wednesday'''
| [https://services.math.duke.edu/~pierce/ Lillian Pierce] (Duke University)
|[[#Lillian Pierce (Duke University) |  Short character sums  ]]
| Boston and Street
|
|-
|Jan 31 '''Thursday'''
| [http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dbaskin/ Dean Baskin] (Texas A&M)
|[[#Dean Baskin (Texas A&M) | Radiation fields for wave equations ]]
| Street
|
|
|-
|-
|Sep 14    '''Room 911'''
|Feb 1
| [https://sites.math.washington.edu/~gunther/ Gunther Uhlmann] (Univ. of Washington) Distinguished Lecture series
| [https://services.math.duke.edu/~jianfeng/ Jianfeng Lu] (Duke University)
|[[#Sep 14: Gunther Uhlmann (Univ. of Washington) Journey to the Center of the Earth ]]
|[[# TBATBA ]]
| Li
| Qin
|
|
|-
|-
|Sep 21    '''Room 911'''
|Feb 5 '''Tuesday'''
| [http://stuart.caltech.edu/ Andrew Stuart] (Caltech) LAA lecture
| [http://www.math.tamu.edu/~alexei.poltoratski/ Alexei Poltoratski] (Texas A&M University)
|[[#Sep 21: Andrew Stuart (Caltech) The Legacy of Rudolph Kalman ]]
|[[# TBATBA ]]
| Jin
| Denisov
|
|
|-
|-
|Sep 28
|Feb 8
| [https://www.math.cmu.edu/~gautam/sj/index.html Gautam Iyer] (CMU)
| [https://sites.math.northwestern.edu/~anaber/ Aaron Naber] (Northwestern)
|[[#Sep 28: Gautam Iyer (CMU)| Stirring and Mixing ]]
|[[#Aaron Naber (Northwestern) |   A structure theory for spaces with lower Ricci curvature bounds  ]]
| Thiffeault
| Street
|
|
|-
|-
|Oct 5
|Feb 15
| [http://www.personal.psu.edu/eus25/ Eyal Subag] (Penn State)
|  
|[[#Oct 5: Eyal Subag (Penn State)Symmetries of the hydrogen atom and algebraic families ]]
|[[# TBATBA ]]
| Gurevich
|  
|
|
|-
|-
|Oct 12
|Feb 22
| [https://www.math.wisc.edu/~andreic/ Andrei Caldararu] (Madison)
| [https://people.math.osu.edu/cueto.5/ Angelica Cueto] (Ohio State)
|[[#Oct 12: Andrei Caldararu (Madison) | Mirror symmetry and derived categories ]]
|[[# TBA| TBA ]]
| ...
| Erman and Corey
|
|
|-
|-
|Oct 19
|March 4
| [https://teitelbaum.math.uconn.edu/# Jeremy Teitelbaum] (U Connecticut)
| [http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~sverak/ Vladimir Sverak] (Minnesota) Wasow lecture
|[[#Oct 19:  Jeremy Teitelbaum (U Connecticut)| Lessons Learned and New Perspectives: From Dean and Provost to aspiring Data Scientist  ]]
|[[# TBA| TBA ]]
| Boston
| Kim
|
|
|-
|-
|Oct 26
|March 8
| [http://math.arizona.edu/~ulmer/index.html Douglas Ulmer] (Arizona)
| [https://orion.math.iastate.edu/jmccullo/index.html Jason McCullough] (Iowa State)
|[[#Oct 26: Douglas Ulmer (Arizona) | Rational numbers, rational functions, and rational points ]]
|[[# TBA| TBA  ]]
| Yang
| Erman
|
|
|-
|-
|Nov 2
|March 15
| Ruixiang Zhang (Madison)
| Maksym Radziwill (Caltech)
|[[#Nov 2: Ruixiang Zhang (Madison) The Fourier extension operator ]]
|[[# TBATBA ]]
|  
| Marshall
|
|
|-
|-
|Nov 7
|March 29
| Reserved for job talk
| Jennifer Park (OSU)
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
| hosting faculty
| Marshall
|
|
|-
|-
|Nov 9
|April 5
| Reserved for job talk
| Ju-Lee Kim (MIT)
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
| hosting faculty
| Gurevich
|
|
|-
|-
|Nov 16
|April 12
| Reserved for job talk
| Evitar Procaccia (TAMU)
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
| hosting faculty
| Gurevich
|
|
|-
|-
|Nov 30
|April 19
| Reserved for job talk
| [http://www.math.rice.edu/~jkn3/ Jo Nelson] (Rice University)
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
| hosting faculty
| Jean-Luc
|
|
|-
|-
|Dec 7
|April 26
| Reserved for job talk
| [https://www.brown.edu/academics/applied-mathematics/faculty/kavita-ramanan/home Kavita Ramanan] (Brown University)
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
| hosting faculty
| WIMAW
|
|-
|May 3
| Tomasz Przebinda (Oklahoma)
|[[# TBA|  TBA  ]]
| Gurevich
|
|
|}
|}
Line 101: Line 118:
== Abstracts ==
== Abstracts ==


=== Sep 12: Gunther Uhlmann (Univ. of Washington) ===
===Beata Randrianantoanina (Miami University Ohio)===
Harry Potter's Cloak via Transformation Optics
 
Can we make objects invisible? This has been a subject of human
fascination for millennia in Greek mythology, movies, science fiction,
etc. including the legend of Perseus versus Medusa and the more recent
Star Trek and Harry Potter. In the last fifteen years or so there have been
several scientific proposals to achieve invisibility. We will introduce in a non-technical fashion
one of them, the so-called "traansformation optics"
in a non-technical fashion n the so-called that has received the most attention in the
scientific literature.
 
=== Sep 14: Gunther Uhlmann (Univ. of Washington) ===
Journey to the Center of the Earth
 
We will consider the inverse problem of determining the sound
speed or index of refraction of a medium by measuring the travel times of
waves going through the medium. This problem arises in global seismology
in an attempt to determine the inner structure of the Earth by measuring
travel times of earthquakes. It has also several applications in optics
and medical imaging among others.
 
The problem can be recast as a geometric problem: Can one determine the
Riemannian metric of a Riemannian manifold with boundary by measuring
the distance function between boundary points? This is the boundary
rigidity problem. We will also consider the problem of determining
the metric from the scattering relation, the so-called lens rigidity
problem. The linearization of these problems involve the integration
of a tensor along geodesics, similar to the X-ray transform.
 
We will also describe some recent results, join with Plamen Stefanov
and Andras Vasy, on the partial data case, where you are making
measurements on a subset of the boundary. No previous knowledge of
Riemannian geometry will be assumed.


=== Sep 21: Andrew Stuart (Caltech) ===
Title: Some nonlinear problems in the geometry of Banach spaces and their applications.


The Legacy of Rudolph Kalman
Abstract: Nonlinear problems in the geometry of Banach spaces have been studied since the inception of the field. In this talk I will outline some of the history, some of modern applications, and some open directions of research. The talk will be accessible to graduate students of any field of mathematics.


In 1960 Rudolph Kalman published what is arguably the first paper to develop a systematic, principled approach to the use of data to improve the predictive capability of mathematical models. As our ability to gather data grows at an enormous rate, the importance of this work continues to grow too. The lecture will describe this paper, and developments that have stemmed from it, revolutionizing fields such space-craft control, weather prediction, oceanography and oil recovery, and with potential for use in new fields such as medical imaging and artificial intelligence. Some mathematical details will be also provided, but limited to simple concepts such as optimization, and iteration; the talk is designed to be broadly accessible to anyone with an interest in quantitative science.
===Lillian Pierce (Duke University)===


=== Sep 28: Gautam Iyer (CMU) ===
Title: Short character sums


Stirring and Mixing
Abstract: A surprisingly diverse array of problems in analytic number theory have at their heart a problem of bounding (from above) an exponential sum, or its multiplicative cousin, a so-called character sum. For example, both understanding the Riemann zeta function or Dirichlet L-functions inside the critical strip, and also counting solutions to Diophantine equations via the circle method or power sieve methods, involve bounding such sums. In general, the sums of interest fall into one of two main regimes: complete sums or incomplete sums, with this latter regime including in particular “short sums.” Short sums are particularly useful, and particularly resistant to almost all known methods. In this talk, we will see what makes a sum “short,” sketch why it would be incredibly powerful to understand short sums, and discuss a curious proof from the 1950’s which is still the best way we know to bound short sums. We will end by describing new work which extends the ideas of this curious proof to bound short sums in much more general situations.


Mixing is something one encounters often in everyday life (e.g. stirring cream into coffee). I will talk about two mathematical
===Dean Baskin (Texas A&M)===
aspects of mixing that arise in the context of fluid dynamics:


1. How efficiently can stirring "mix"?
Title: Radiation fields for wave equations


2. What is the interaction between diffusion and mixing.
Abstract: Radiation fields are rescaled limits of solutions of wave equations near "null infinity" and capture the radiation pattern seen by a distant observer. They are intimately connected with the Fourier and Radon transforms and with scattering theory. In this talk, I will define and discuss radiation fields in a few contexts, with an emphasis on spacetimes that look flat near infinity. The main result is a connection between the asymptotic behavior of the radiation field and a family of quantum objects on an associated asymptotically hyperbolic space.


Both these aspects are rich in open problems whose resolution involves tools from various different areas. I present a brief survey of existing
===Aaron Naber (Northwestern)===
results, and talk about a few open problems.


=== Oct 5: Eyal Subag (Penn State)===
Title: A structure theory for spaces with lower Ricci curvature bounds.


Symmetries of the hydrogen atom and algebraic families
Abstract:  One should view manifolds (M^n,g) with lower Ricci curvature bounds as being those manifolds with a well behaved analysis, a point which can be rigorously stated.  It thus becomes a natural question, how well behaved or badly behaved can such spaces be?  This is a nonlinear analogue to asking how degenerate can a subharmonic or plurisubharmonic function look like.  In this talk we give an essentially sharp answer to this question.  The talk will require little background, and our time will be spent on understanding the basic statements and examples.  The work discussed is joint with Cheeger, Jiang and with Li.


The hydrogen atom system is one of the most thoroughly studied examples of a quantum mechanical system. It can be fully solved, and the main reason why is its (hidden) symmetry.  In this talk I shall explain how the symmetries of the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom, both visible and hidden,  give rise to an example in the recently developed theory of algebraic families of Harish-Chandra modules.  I will show how the algebraic structure of these symmetries completely determines the spectrum of the Schrödinger operator and sheds new light on the quantum nature of the system.  No prior knowledge on quantum mechanics or representation theory will be assumed.
=== Oct 12: Andrei Caldararu (Madison)===
Mirror symmetry and derived categories
Mirror symmetry is a remarkable phenomenon, first discovered in physics. It relates two seemingly disparate areas of mathematics, symplectic and algebraic geometry. Its initial formulation was rather narrow, as a technique for computing enumerative invariants (so-called Gromov-Witten invariants) of symplectic varieties by solving certain differential equations describing the variation of Hodge structure of “mirror" varieties. Over the past 25 years this narrow view has expanded considerably, largely due to insights of M. Kontsevich who introduced techniques from derived categories into the subject. Nowadays mirror symmetry encompasses wide areas of mathematics, touching on subjects like birational geometry, number theory, homological algebra, etc.
In my talk I shall survey some of the recent developments in mirror symmetry, and I will explain how my work fits in the general picture. In particular I will describe an example of derived equivalent but not birational Calabi-Yau three folds (joint work with Lev Borisov); and a recent computation of a categorical Gromov-Witten invariant of positive genus (work with my former student Junwu Tu).
===  Oct 19:  Jeremy Teitelbaum (U Connecticut)===
Lessons Learned and New Perspectives:
From Dean and Provost to aspiring Data Scientist
After more than 10 years in administration, including 9 as Dean of
Arts and Sciences and 1 as interim Provost at UConn, I have returned
to my faculty position.  I am spending a year as a visiting scientist
at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine (JAX-GM) in Farmington,
Connecticut, trying to get a grip on some of the mathematical problems
of interest to researchers in cancer genomics.  In this talk, I will offer some personal
observations about being a mathematician and a high-level administrator, talk a bit about
the research environment at an independent research institute like JAX-GM, outline
a few problems that I've begun to learn about, and conclude with a
discussion of how these experiences have shaped my view of graduate training in mathematics.
=== Oct 26: Douglas Ulmer (Arizona)===
Rational numbers, rational functions, and rational points
One of the central concerns of arithmetic geometry is the study of
solutions of systems of polynomial equations where the solutions are
required to lie in a "small" field such as the rational numbers.  I
will explain the landscape of expectations and conjectures in this
area, focusing on curves and their Jacobians over global fields
(number fields and function fields), and then survey the progress made
over the last decade in the function field case.  The talk is intended
to be accessible to a wide audience.
=== Nov 2: Ruixiang Zhang (Madison)===
The Fourier extension operator
I will present an integral operator that originated in the study of the Euclidean Fourier transform and is closely related to many problems in PDE, spectral theory, analytic number theory and combinatorics. I will then introduce some recent developments in harmonic analysis concerning this operator. I will mainly focus on various new ways to "induct on scales" that played an important role on the recent solution in all dimensions to Carleson's a.e. convergence problem on free Schrödinger solutions.


== Past Colloquia ==
== Past Colloquia ==


[[Colloquia/Blank|Blank]]
[[Colloquia/Blank|Blank]]
[[Colloquia/Fall2018|Fall 2018]]


[[Colloquia/Spring2018|Spring 2018]]
[[Colloquia/Spring2018|Spring 2018]]

Latest revision as of 14:43, 24 January 2019

Mathematics Colloquium

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

The calendar for spring 2019 can be found here.

Spring 2019

date speaker title host(s)
Jan 25 Beata Randrianantoanina (Miami University Ohio) WIMAW Some nonlinear problems in the geometry of Banach spaces and their applications Tullia Dymarz
Jan 30 Wednesday Lillian Pierce (Duke University) Short character sums Boston and Street
Jan 31 Thursday Dean Baskin (Texas A&M) Radiation fields for wave equations Street
Feb 1 Jianfeng Lu (Duke University) TBA Qin
Feb 5 Tuesday Alexei Poltoratski (Texas A&M University) TBA Denisov
Feb 8 Aaron Naber (Northwestern) A structure theory for spaces with lower Ricci curvature bounds Street
Feb 15 TBA
Feb 22 Angelica Cueto (Ohio State) TBA Erman and Corey
March 4 Vladimir Sverak (Minnesota) Wasow lecture TBA Kim
March 8 Jason McCullough (Iowa State) TBA Erman
March 15 Maksym Radziwill (Caltech) TBA Marshall
March 29 Jennifer Park (OSU) TBA Marshall
April 5 Ju-Lee Kim (MIT) TBA Gurevich
April 12 Evitar Procaccia (TAMU) TBA Gurevich
April 19 Jo Nelson (Rice University) TBA Jean-Luc
April 26 Kavita Ramanan (Brown University) TBA WIMAW
May 3 Tomasz Przebinda (Oklahoma) TBA Gurevich

Abstracts

Beata Randrianantoanina (Miami University Ohio)

Title: Some nonlinear problems in the geometry of Banach spaces and their applications.

Abstract: Nonlinear problems in the geometry of Banach spaces have been studied since the inception of the field. In this talk I will outline some of the history, some of modern applications, and some open directions of research. The talk will be accessible to graduate students of any field of mathematics.

Lillian Pierce (Duke University)

Title: Short character sums

Abstract: A surprisingly diverse array of problems in analytic number theory have at their heart a problem of bounding (from above) an exponential sum, or its multiplicative cousin, a so-called character sum. For example, both understanding the Riemann zeta function or Dirichlet L-functions inside the critical strip, and also counting solutions to Diophantine equations via the circle method or power sieve methods, involve bounding such sums. In general, the sums of interest fall into one of two main regimes: complete sums or incomplete sums, with this latter regime including in particular “short sums.” Short sums are particularly useful, and particularly resistant to almost all known methods. In this talk, we will see what makes a sum “short,” sketch why it would be incredibly powerful to understand short sums, and discuss a curious proof from the 1950’s which is still the best way we know to bound short sums. We will end by describing new work which extends the ideas of this curious proof to bound short sums in much more general situations.

Dean Baskin (Texas A&M)

Title: Radiation fields for wave equations

Abstract: Radiation fields are rescaled limits of solutions of wave equations near "null infinity" and capture the radiation pattern seen by a distant observer. They are intimately connected with the Fourier and Radon transforms and with scattering theory. In this talk, I will define and discuss radiation fields in a few contexts, with an emphasis on spacetimes that look flat near infinity. The main result is a connection between the asymptotic behavior of the radiation field and a family of quantum objects on an associated asymptotically hyperbolic space.

Aaron Naber (Northwestern)

Title: A structure theory for spaces with lower Ricci curvature bounds.

Abstract: One should view manifolds (M^n,g) with lower Ricci curvature bounds as being those manifolds with a well behaved analysis, a point which can be rigorously stated. It thus becomes a natural question, how well behaved or badly behaved can such spaces be? This is a nonlinear analogue to asking how degenerate can a subharmonic or plurisubharmonic function look like. In this talk we give an essentially sharp answer to this question. The talk will require little background, and our time will be spent on understanding the basic statements and examples. The work discussed is joint with Cheeger, Jiang and with Li.


Past Colloquia

Blank

Fall 2018

Spring 2018

Fall 2017

Spring 2017

Fall 2016

Spring 2016

Fall 2015

Spring 2015

Fall 2014

Spring 2014

Fall 2013

Spring 2013

Fall 2012