Past Events

In Manak's talk, we learned what a deformation functor is. We will explore this notion more in depth and look at some examples. Deformation functors allow us to make the idea of a "formal moduli problem" more precise. Time permitting, we will discuss...

The Association of Women in Mathematics Student Chapter (AWMSC) is hosting a talk by Dr. Gerda de Vries titled "Hidden Figures: Eminent Women in Applied Mathematics" on January 23rd (TODAY!) from 4-5PM in CAB 457.

Let A and B be compact sets in ℝd. One of the fundamental problems in geometric measure theory is to study the relations between the Hausdorff dimensions of A, B, and A∩f(B), where f runs through a set of transformations. This type of question has...

Random band matrices provide a simple model for studying the metal-insulator transition of random operators, the prominent example of which is the Anderson model. According to the famous sqrt(N) conjecture, N x N random matrices with non-zero entries...

I will talk about the `minimal spanning arborescence', a directed version of the Minimal spanning tree. I will explain how this naturally leads to a new type of stochastic process which we call `loop contracting random walk'. I will show how this can...

Topological insulators are novel materials which are on the one hand insulators in their bulk, yet on the other hand excellent conductors along their edge. This distinguished property, and many more, are explained via the rich topological structure...

In this talk, we will discuss the classical problem, known as Falconer's distance problem, of quantifying the minimum amount of pairwise distances associated with a given Borel set in Euclidean space. For the last 25 years, methods in harmonic...

Advances in microscopy can now provide snapshot images of individual RNA molecules within a nucleus. Decoding the underlying spatiotemporal dynamics is important for understanding gene expression, but challenging due to the static, heterogeneous, and...

We discuss the role of long Dirichlet polynomials in number theory. We first survey some applications of mean values of long Dirichlet polynomials over primes in the theory of the Riemann zeta function which includes central limit theorems and pair...

Pure mathematics and theoretical physics have a long history of mutual influence and cross-pollination. In recent times, many exciting developments have to do with the effort to better understand quantum field theory. From the physicist's perspective...