University of Washington

In this talk the speaker will identify elementary mathematical frameworks for the study of old and new drag racing beliefs. In this manner some myths are validated, while others are destroyed. The first part of the talk will be a historical account...

In this talk we'll look into how modelers use and compromise mathematics in industry, specifically finance, internet advertising and social media, and education. The goal of the talk is to encourage mathematicians to be more engaged with the way math...

The operations of time shift (ƒ(t) → ƒ(t+1)) and frequency shift (ƒ(t) → e2πiωtƒ(t)) are fundamental ingredients of applied Fourier analysis, and the group of operators on L2(ℝ) that they generate gives a unitary representation of the so-called...

An exotic sphere is a smooth manifold which is homeomorphic, but not diffeomorphic, to a standard sphere. In which dimensions do there exist exotic spheres? I will discuss what we know about the answer to this question in terms of the classical work...

For bin packing, the input consists of n items with sizes s_1,...,s_n in [0,1] which have to be assigned to a minimum number of bins of size 1. The seminal Karmarkar-Karp algorithm from 1982 produces a solution with at most OPT + O(log^2 OPT) bins in...

Various notions of the "slope" of a real-valued function pervade optimization, and variational mathematics more broadly. In the semi-algebraic setting - an appealing model for concrete variational problems - the slope is particularly well-behaved...

In an inverse boundary value problem one is interested in determining the internal properties of a medium by making measurements on the boundary of the medium. In mathematical terms, one wishes to recover the coefficients of a partial differential...

The Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE) is a family of random fractal curves that arise in a natural manner as scaling limits of interfaces in planar critical lattice models from statistical mechanics. The SLE curves exhibit many interesting geometric...

One of the major developments in number theory during the 20th century is the invention of class field theory. In this talk we will recall some highlights of this theory, and explain how to apply it to solve geometric problems. In particular, we will...

Statistical modeling amounts to specifying a set of candidates for what the probability distribution of an observed random quantity might be. Many models used in practice are of an algebraic nature in that they are defined in terms of a polynomial...