Past Events

In this talk we’ll continue to get to know bicategories by learning about what you can do inside a bicategory. We’ll learn about pasting diagrams as well as adjoints and equivalences inside bicategories before presenting some examples of what these...

The autumn 2024 edition of the West Coast Optimization Meeting will be held on 20–21 September, 2024 on the Vancouver Campus of the University of British Columbia. The organizers (Michael Friedlander, Mark Schmidt, and Philip Loewen) are pleased to...

In 1770 Euler observed that $3^3+4^3+5^3=6^3$ and asked if there was another perfect power that equals the sum of consecutive cubes. This captivated the attention of many important mathematicians, such as Cunningham, Catalan, Genocchi and Lucas. In...

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 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...