Past Events

A basic example of a family of curves with level structure is the Hesse pencil of elliptic curves: $$x^3+y^3+z^3+ \lambda xyz = 0,$$ which gives a family of elliptic curves with labelled 3-torsion points. The parameter $\lambda$ is a parameter on the...

This talk will introduce the topic of graph product structure theory. I will show that many graphs with bounded treewidth can be described as subgraphs of the strong product of a graph with smaller treewidth and a bounded-size complete graph. To this...

It is well known that a line can intersect at most 2n-1 cells of the n x n chessboard. What happens in higher dimensions: how many cells of the d-dimensional [0,n]^d box can a hyperplane intersect? We also prove the integer analogue of the following...

What happens to a progressively dilating body when folding the space in which it lives? For a start, we shall examine the problem in a Euclidean context, surveying results of Randol and Strichartz through the quantitative, fractal-geometric viewpoint...

Resolving a conjecture of Erdos and Turan from the 1930's, in the 1970's Szemeredi showed that a set of integers with positive upper density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Soon thereafter, Furstenberg used Ergodic Theory to gave a...

The Wasserstein distance is a powerful tool in modern machine learning to metrize the space of probability distributions in a way that takes into account the geometry of the domain. Therefore, a lot of attention has been devoted in the literature to...

Chebyshev noticed in 1853 that there is a predominance, for “most” real numbers x ≥ 2, of the number of primes ≤ x and congruent to 3 modulo 4 over primes ≤ x and congruent to 1 modulo 4. Since then, several generalizations of this phenomenon have...

PIMS is excited to host the 2022 CRM-Fields-PIMS prize winner for an afternoon lecture. The 2021 winner, Andrew Granville, will be presenting at the University of British Columbia. The lecture will be online, allowing members from the PIMS community...

There are two rotary motors in biology, ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellar motor. Both are driven by transmembrane ionic currents. We consider an idealized model of such a motor, essentially an electrostatic turbine. The model has a rotor and a...

A Glass network is a system of first order ODEs with discontinuous right hand side coming from step function terms. The "ON/OFF" switching dynamics from the step functions makes Glass networks effective at modelling switching behaviour typical of...