Past Events

Oilsands tailings ponds are waste reservoirs where bioavailable organic materialcan be largely converted into methane. This methane is produced by activemethanogenic and bacterial communities capable of surviving even undernutrient-poor conditions...

Glass Klein bottles? Sure! How about knots and knot-compliments? A Boys Surface? Plenty of topological manifolds work well in glass. With good fortune, SFU's glass-blower, Lucas Clarke, will demonstrate his art in making mathematical manifolds in...

The Rudin-Shapiro polynomials $p_{m}$ were first studied by Rudin, Shapiro, and Golay independently nearly 80 years ago and are defined recursively by $p_{0}(x) = q_{0}(x) = 1$ and $$ p_{m}(x) = p_{m-1}(x) + x^{2^{m-1}} q_{m-1}(x), $$ $$ q_{m}(x) = p...

In this talk we will discuss recent results concerning stochastic (and deterministic) free boundary problems, particularly arising in fluid structure interaction (FSI). We will begin by considering a nonlinearly coupled FSI system perturbed by...

Networks are everywhere in biology - from molecules that interact within a cell to neurons that communicate across the brain. Understanding how signals flow through these networks is key to uncovering how biological systems function - and how they...

In this talk, I will describe the life of a researcher working in the games industry. Along the way, I’ll introduce some of the research we do at CD PROJEKT RED and the kinds of technical challenges we deal with. I’ll also talk about how I found...

Pick your favorite manifold M and a positive integer r : how many r rank (topological) complex vector bundles are there over M up to isomorphism? While the question is accessible via K-theory in the stable range, unstably such bundles become much...

The Haglund--Haiman--Loehr theorem (2005) provides a combinatorial formula for the modified Macdonald polynomials, highlighting the surprising connections between modified Macdonald polynomials and combinatorial statistics such as the major index and...

We will introduce Random Spanning Trees in Random Environment (RSTRE), a disordered system on spanning trees that interpolates between the Uniform Spanning Tree (UST) and Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) measures. Our primary goal is to study how local...

In this talk, I will describe the mathematics behind proving lower bounds on quantum circuit depth using light-cone arguments. These arguments have been used to prove lower bounds on the complexities of physically relevant ground states. No quantum...