PIMS Network Wide Colloquium | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

In 2021, PIMS inaugurated a high-level network wide colloquium series. For this series, distinguished speakers give talks across the full PIMS network with one talk per month during the academic term. These seminars will be available online. Please see our notes on effective virtual events for tips on getting the most out of our online events. The seminars will be recorded, and the recordings will be available on mathtube.org.

Upcoming Events

I will discuss a result with Bonatti and Crovisier from 2009 showing that the C^1 generic diffeomorphism f of a closed manifold has trivial centralizer; i.e. fg = gf implies that g is a power of f. I’ll discuss features of the C^1 topology that...

TBA

Past Events

Finding and enumerating Boolean intervals in $W(\mathfrak{S}_n)$, the weak order of symmetric group $\mathfrak{S}_n$, can feel like trying to find needles in a haystack. However, through surprising connection to the outcome map of parking functions...

When particles interact with attractive-repulsive dynamics, which can model birds flocking, space dust, or a variety of other phenomena, they tend to form a nice distribution. Understanding these distributions is an active area of applied analysis...

For centuries, mathematicians have relied on computers to perform calculations, to suggest conjectures, and as components of mathematical proofs. In the light of more modern tools such as interactive theorem provers, machine learning algorithms, and...

We will introduce the research area of complex dynamics by studying the family of (complex) quadratic polynomials, $z->z^2+c$. Historically, mathematicians first studied the dynamics of {\em real} quadratic polynomials and then moved to the complex...

We consider metric tensors on undirected weighted graphs G, which allows us to treat P(G), the set of probability vectors on G, as a length space. On defines a divergence operator div_\mu(G) for mu in P(G), in such a way that we can use control...

Learning with Errors (LWE) is a hard math problem with algebraic structure, underpinning many proposed Post-Quantum Cryptosystems (PQC). The only PQC key exchange standardized by NIST is based on module LWE, and current publicly available PQC...

Euler’s famous formula tells us that (with appropriate caveats), a map on the sphere with f countries (faces), e borders (edges), and v border-ends (vertices) will satisfy v-e+f=2. And more generally, for a map on a surface with g holes, v-e+f=2-2g...

The classical obstacle problem consists of finding the equilibrium position of an elastic membrane whose boundary is held fixed and which is constrained to lie above a given obstacle. By classical results of Caffarelli, the free boundary is smooth...

The past twenty-five years have heralded an unparalleled increase in understanding of cancer. At the same time, mathematical modelling has emerged as a natural tool for unravelling the complex processes that contribute to the initiation and...

Modern machine learning has had remarkable success in all kinds of AI applications, and is also poised to change fundamentally the way we do research in traditional areas of science and engineering. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of...