Past Events

The Zariski closure of the central path (which interior point algorithms track in convex optimization problems such as linear and semidefinite programs) is an algebraic curve, called the central curve. Its degree has been studied in relation to the...

The sign test (Arbuthnott, 1710) and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (Wilcoxon, 1945) are among the first examples of a nonparametric test. These procedures — based on signs, (absolute) ranks and signed-ranks — yield distribution-free tests for...

Consider a birth-death process started from one individual in which each individual gives birth at rate λ and dies at rate μ, so that the population size grows at rate r=λ−μ. Lambert (2018) and Harris, Johnston, and Roberts (2020) came up with...

The growth, form, and division of membrane-bound vesicles and organelles is a unifying motif across biology. Membranes form the boundaries of the nucleus and cell, organelles such as mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum, and vesicles used to...

Vertex operator algebras are the symmetry algebras of two dimensional conformal field theory. In a famous series of papers, Kazhdan and Lusztig proved an equivalence between particular semisimple categories of modules over affine Lie algebras and...

Cubical sets with connections model (∞,1)-categories via the cubical Joyal model structure, constructed and shown to be equivalent to the Joyal model structure on simplicial sets by Doherty-Kapulkin-Lindsey-Sattler. In the same work, an analogous...

Fractional-step methods are a popular and powerful divide-and-conquer approach for the numerical solution of differential equations. When the integrators of the fractional steps (the sub-integrators) are Runge-Kutta methods, such methods can be...

Graphs having three distinct eigenvalues are a fundamental object of study in spectral graph theory. Strongly regular graphs are the most well-studied examples. In 1995, at the 15th British Combinatorial Conference, Willem Haemers asked do there...

Given a family R of rectangles in the plane, the packing number of R, denoted by $\nu$(R), is the maximum size of a set of pairwise disjoint rectangles in R, and the hitting number, denoted by $\tau$(R), is the minimum size of a set of points having...

The Riemann zeta function plays a central role in our understanding of the prime numbers. In this talk we will review some of its amazing properties as well as properties of other similar functions, the Dirichlet L-functions. We will then see how the...