University of Washington

We will begin by giving an elementary introduction to the GL(2,R) action on the Hodge bundle (sometimes called Teichmuller dynamics), after which we will give a survey of some of new developments in this field. This will include restrictions on the...

The 57th Cascade Topology Seminar will take place at Seattle University. The titles and abstracts for this event are: Ryan Derby-Talbot: Computing Heegaard genus is NP-Hard One of the most basic measures of the complexity of a 3-manifold is its...

I will present three new results: (i) the Cramer transform of the uniform measure on a convex body is a universal self-concordant barrier; (ii) projected gradient descent with Gaussian noise allows to sample from a log-concave measure in polynomial...

A symplectic structure is a kind of geometric structure that can be put on an even dimensional space. It generalizes the notion of an area form in two dimensions in such a way that many of the special dynamical features of area preserving geometry...

Igusa class polynomials are the genus 2 analogue of Hilbert class polynomials; their roots are invariants of genus 2 curves that have complex multiplication by a fixed order. The coefficients of Igusa class polynomials are rational, but, unlike in...

The Pacific Northwest Geometry Seminar (PNGS) is a regional meeting for geometers of all kinds. It is held every fall and spring, and every other winter, rotating among the following participating institutions: Oregon State University Portland State...

The ABC Conjecture, formulated in the mid-1980's by Oesterlé and Masser, is one of the most important conjectures in number theory. It has many deep consequences, but its basic formulation can be given in entirely elementary terms. In September 2012...

Let A be an abelian variety of dimension g over a number field K. The Sato-Tate group ST(A) is a compact subgroup of the unitary symplectic group USp(2g) that can be defined in terms of the l-adic Galois representation associated to A. Under the...

I will begin with the familiar Farey sequences: the subdivisions of the real line obtained by recursively taking the mediant (a+c)/(b+d) of fractions a/b and c/d. I will take this starting point as an excuse for an ecclectic tour which may include...