Past Events
Scientific, Seminar
SCAIM Seminar: Dominique Orban (École Polytechnique Montréal)
November 30, 2010
University of British Columbia
Interior-point methods for linear and convex quadratic programming require the solution of a sequence of symmetric indefinite linear systems to derive search directions. Safeguards are typically required to handle free variables or rank-deficient...
Scientific, Seminar
Mathematical Biology Seminar: Carlos Castillo-Chavez (Arizona State)
November 30, 2010
University of British Columbia
This presentation starts with a quick epidemiological overview that puts emphasis on neglected diseases and health disparities in the context of developing and/or poor nations. The primary emphasis is however on Tuberculosis (TB). A review of...
Scientific, Seminar
IAM-PIMS-MITACS Distinguished Colloquium Series: Rustom Antia (Emory University)
November 29, 2010
University of British Columbia
Over the past decade we have dramatically changed our views of the generation of immune responses. In the earlier (conventional) view, the specific immune response to a pathogen was modeled by equations similar to a simple predator-prey systems in...
Scientific, Seminar
Topology working seminar: Maxim Stykow (UBC)
November 29, 2010
University of British Columbia
Sheaves of Categories and the Main Theorem After talking about how a sheaf of categories gives rise to a topological category, I will finish the proof of the main theorem of Galatius, Madsen, Weiss and Tillmann which states that the classifying space...
Scientific, Seminar
Algebraic Geometry Seminar: Mircea Mustata (Michigan)
November 29, 2010
University of British Columbia
Log canonical thresholds are invariants of singularities that play an important role in birational geometry. After an introduction to these invariants, I will describe recent progress on a conjecture of Shokurov predicting the Ascending Chain...
Scientific, Seminar
Special PIMS Distinguished Lecture: Louis Nirenberg (NYU) - CANCELLED
November 26, 2010
University of British Columbia
At the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Hyderabad, India this past August, Louis Nirenberg, from the Courant Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at New York University, was awarded the inaugural Chern Medal for his role in the...
Scientific, Seminar
Special Seminar: Jie Shen (Purdue)
November 26, 2010
University of British Columbia
Many scientific, engineering and financial applications require solving high-dimensional PDEs. However, traditional tensor product based algorithms suffer from the so called "curse of dimensionality". We shall construct a new sparse spectral method...
Scientific, Seminar
Mathematics Colloquium: Jie Shen (Purdue)
November 25, 2010
University of British Columbia
I shall present an energetic variational phase field model for multiphase incompressible flows which leads to a set of coupled nonlinear system consisting a phase equation and the Navier-Stokes equations. We shall pay particular attention to...
Scientific, Seminar
Topology Seminar: Thomas Huettemann (Queen's University Belfast)
November 25, 2010
University of British Columbia
Toric schemes admit a combinatorial description which, in turn, allows one to describe sheaves of modules by certain diagram categories. I will explain these basic constructions in some detail, and then give a non-standard approach to constructing...
Scientific, Seminar
PIMS/WMAX Postdoctoral Colloquium: Pierre Guillot (PIMS-UBC)
November 25, 2010
University of British Columbia
The quadratic reciprocity law (dating back to Gauss) cute result of algebra letting you decide almost instantly whether a given integer is a square modulo a prime. This theorem is famous for having about 100 different proofs, and counting. I'll...