Past Events

Can you embed the real projective plane in three-dimensional space? Motivated by this and similar questions, I will introduce the correspondence between real line bundles and hypersurfaces, the first Stiefel-Whitney class, and Poincare duality. In...

The boxicity of a graph G is a key graph parameter introduced by Roberts in 1969. It represents the minimum dimension d such that G can be realized as the intersection graph of a family of axis-parallel boxes in R^d. Boxicity is an important measure...

The Monomer-Dimer model is a Gibbs measure defined on the space of matchings (not necessarily perfect) on a graph. This talk will concerned the disordered version of this problem with additional environmental randomness, the weights of the matchings...

A spanning tree of a finite connected graph G is a connected subgraph of G that includes every vertex and contains no cycles. In this talk we will consider uniformly drawn spanning trees of high-dimensional graphs, and explain why, under appropriate...

Hysteresis, a phenomenon in which the response of a system lags behind and depends on its past history, has been used to understand various psychosocial phenomena, including abrupt shifts in opinion dynamics, political polarization, and more. The aim...

Let G be a graph with adjacency matrix A. A continuous quantum walk on G is determined by the complex unitary matrix U(t)=exp(itA), where i2=−1 and t is a real number. Here, G represents a quantum spin network, and its vertices and edges represent...

In what will hopefully become a department tradition, the first colloquium of the year this Friday will consist of introductions of ten new post-doctoral fellows who have joined the department in the past few months. Each PDF will give a 5-minute...

In this talk, we will investigate the acoustic transmission eigenvalue problem associated with an inhomogeneous media with a conductive boundary. These are a new class of eigenvalue problems that are not elliptic, not self-adjoint, and non-linear...

Bicategories are an important aspect of modern category theory and provide the first instance of “category theory up to coherent isomorphism” we see when hiking up Mount Higher Category Theory. In this talk I will introduce the notion of bicategories...

Many quantum search algorithms are equivalent to coined quantum walks that start from a uniform superposition of arcs and get very close to a state that "concentrates on" some marked vertex. In this talk, we consider a related problem: if we start...