Past Events

The goal of this conference is to drastically rethink the first-year university mathematics curriculum. What skills and knowledge do we want students to develop and gain in mathematics courses? What pedagogical methods are most effective? How can we...

There is a rich interplay between the degree of regularity of a group action on the circle and the allowable algebraic structure of the group. I will outline some highlights of this theory, culminating in a construction due to Kim and myself of...

The Consulate General of France, in Vancouver, together with PIMS are pleased to host French Mathematician Etienne Ghys during his Vancouver Tour, May 2-3 2019. Étienne Ghys is a French mathematician. His scientific contributions deal with the...

A primary goal of evolution biology is to understand the mechanisms that generate and shape the vast diversity of life. From stable polymorphisms at susceptibility loci to the maintenance of sexual reproduction, pathogens are thought to play an...

When a group acts faithfully by orientation-preserving homeomorphisms on S^1, one can sometimes use the action on S^1 to prove the existence of a faithful order-preserving action by homeomorphisms on the real line. This can be reworded in algebraic...

As climate warms, different phenotypes, such as different flowering time in plants or breeding date in birds, are favored by natural selection. To persist, species must therefore change their geographical distribution to track the climate to which...

Computers can be programmed to do a variety of tasks which, if a human had done them, we might identify as creative tasks. But does that mean that they themselves are creative? We examine the state of the art in computer-generated poetry, and examine...

In this talk I will present the personal journey that the study of mathematics has allowed me to travel so far. It begins with a typical academic career, focused on research in applied mathematics, and specifically the mathematics related to the...

We give a nearly efficient *deterministic* algorithm for approximately counting the number of 0/1-coordinate-points in high-dimensional polytopes. The two main technical tools are: a new multidimensional Berry--Eseen theorem under limited...

Identifying and visualizing meaningful clusters within high-dimensional (HD) data is an important but challenging problem with applications to molecular biology and biomedicine. For example, mass cytometry (CyTOF) is a high-throughput single-cell...