Past Events

Over the last forty years, most progress in four-dimensional topology came from gauge theory and related invariants. Khovanov homology is an invariant of knots in of a different kind: its construction is combinatorial, and connected to ideas from...

Mathematics on the Indian subcontinent has been flourishing for over two and a half millennia, and this culture of inquiry has produced insights and techniques that are central to many of our mathematical practices today, such as the base ten decimal...

This is a joint initiative between optimizers and mathematicians at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) and the University of British Columbia (UBC), Okanagan campus. 1:30-2:30: Yana Nec (TRU): Spike pattern as a window into non-injective transient...

The theory of large deviations provides with a way to compute asymptotically the probability that an interacting particle system moves from a given configuration to another one over a fixed time interval. The problem of finding the most likely...

The theory of large deviations provides with a way to compute asymptotically the probability that an interacting particle system moves from a given configuration to another one over a fixed time interval. The problem of finding the most likely...

Ginzburg–Landau theory is one of the oldest models in classical field theory for spontaneous symmetry breaking through the Higgs mechanism. Minimizers of the Ginzburg–Landau free energy, called vortices, are well-understood, especially in 2...

We discuss constructions based on finite fields of three types of combinatorial arrays: orthogonal, covering and ordered orthogonal arrays. Other combinatorial arrays have been similarly considered in the literature, including permutation arrays...

A celebrated theorem of Jorgens-Calabi-Pogorelov says that global convex solutions to the Monge-Ampere equation det(D^2u) = 1 are quadratic polynomials. On the other hand, an example of Pogorelov shows that local solutions can have line singularities...

The Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi is usually said to be the 'father of algebra', or otherwise that 'the Arabs invented algebra'. There is probably nothing in the previous sentence that is true (except the 'usually'). It turns out that the...