Past Events

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...

An highly active research area is concerned with finding conditions on sparse sets that ensure the existence of many geometric patterns. I will present some results in this direction connecting Newhouse thickness and its generalizations to higher...

Hyperbolic transport-reaction systems are often used to model the finite speed movement and interaction of particles, bacteria or animals. The most known example is the Goldstein-Kac model (1974) and its connection to the telegraph equation. To the...

A power series f(x1,…,xm)∈C[[x1,…,xm]] is said to be D-finite if all the partial derivatives of f span a finite dimensional vector space over the field C(x1,…,xm). For the univariate series f(x)=∑anxn, this is equivalent to the condition that the...

Abstract: Consider Z^2, and assign a random length of 1 or 2 to each edge based on independent fair coin tosses. The resulting random geometry, first passage percloation, is conjectured to have a scaling limit. Most random plane geometric models...