Past Events

Every animal cell is filled with a cytoskeleton, a dynamic gel made of inextensible filaments / bio-polymers, such as microtubules, actin filaments, and intermediate filaments, all suspended in a viscous fluid. Similar suspensions of elastic...

Let G be a connected simple graph and L be its Laplacian matrix. Let v be a cut vertex and B be a branch at v. Assume that v_1 is the only vertex in B adjacent to v. Let P be a path that starts at v_1 and stays inside B. It is shown that the...

During 2005-2006, Arveson and Douglas formulated a challenging conjecture in multivariable operator theory regarding the essential normality of compressed shifts in the usual Hilbert spaces of analytic functions, say, Bergman spaces on strongly...

Back in the old days, before the invention of Apple Wireless Airpods, people were more familiar with the tendency of the headphones in their pockets to become knotted. It seems natural to expect that the probability that a random curve is tangled...

SFU's Association for Women in Mathematics Student Chapter, in collaboration with the Department of Mathematics EDI Advisory Group, is hosting a series of events for the International Women in Mathematics Day. The celebration begins with a Women’s...

Borsuk’s number b(n) is the smallest integer such that any set of diameter 1 in the n-dimensional space can be covered by b(n) sets of a smaller diameter. Exponential upper bounds on b(n) were first obtained by Shramm (1988) and later by Bourgain and...

In this talk I will present several eigenvalue bounds on the independence number and the distance chromatic number of graph powers. We will see how to use polynomials and mixed-integer linear programming in order to optimize such bounds. Some...

In 2016, Gay and Kirby showed that every compact smooth 4-manifold can be decomposed into three standard pieces. A particularly nice feature of this decomposition is that the smooth topology of the 4-manifold can be encoded by curves on a surface. In...

TBA

It is well-known that quadratic forms can be diagonalized over fields and that they are in a one-to-one correspondence with bilinear forms; the algebraic theory of quadratic forms is build on these two properties. But there is a catch -- they require...