University of Washington

Next year brings the 100th anniversary of Watson's classic paper "The diffraction of electric waves by the earth" and I would like to use this as a welcome excuse to review various results about scattering by spherical obstacles. Is the sphere...

A conjecture of Read predicts that the coefficients of the chromatic polynomial of a graph form a log-concave sequence for any graph. A related conjecture of Welsh predicts that the number of linearly independent subsets of varying sizes form a log...

Derivative free optimization (DFO) is the field that addresses optimization of black-box functions – that is functions whose value can be computed (possibly approximately) but whose derivatives cannot be approximated directly. The applications of DFO...

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...

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...

Standard Young tableaux are fundamental in combinatorics, representation theory, and geometry. In this talk, we will define these objects and discuss some of their remarkable properties. In particular, we will discuss the connection between the major...

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...