## Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 255 , Yuriy Mileyko , School of Biology, Georgia Tech , Organizer:
The expression dynamics of interacting genes depends on the topology of the regulatory network, the quantitative nature of feedbacks and interactions between DNA, RNA and proteins, and the biochemical state of the intracellular and surrounding environment. In this talk we show that dynamics of a gene regulatory network can also depend sensitively on the copy number of genes and promoters. Genetic regulatory networks include an overrepresentation of subgraphs commonly known as network motifs. We consider positive feedback, bistable feedback, and toggle switch motifs and show that variation in gene copy number can cause a sequence of saddle-node bifurcations in the corresponding differential equations models, which leads to multiple orders of magnitude change in gene expression. A similar analysis of a 3-gene motif with successive inhibition (the repressilator'') reveals that changes in gene copy number can also cause a Hopf bifurcation, thus leading to a qualitative switch in system behavior among oscillatory and equilibrium dynamics. Importantly, we show that these bifurcations exist over a wide range of parameter values, thus reinforcing our claim that copy number is a key control parameter in the expression dynamics of regulatory networks.
Series: PDE Seminar
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 - 15:05 , Location: Skiles 255 , Govind Menon , Brown University , Organizer:
The problem of understanding the parabolic hull of Brownian motion arises in two different fields. In mathematical physics this is the Burgers-Hopf caricature of turbulence (very interesting, even if not entirely turbulent). In statistics, the limit distribution we study was first considered by Chernoff, and forms the cornerstone of a large class of limit theorems that have now come to be called 'cube-root-asymptotics'. It was in the statistical context that the problem was first solved completely in the mid-80s by Groeneboom in a tour de force of hard analysis. We consider another approach to his solution motivated by recent work on stochastic coalescence (especially work of Duchon, Bertoin, and my joint work with Bob Pego). The virtues of this approach are simplicity, generality, and the appearance of a completely unexpected Lax pair. If time permits, I will also indicate some tantalizing links of this approach with random matrices. This work forms part of my student Ravi Srinivasan's dissertation.
Monday, February 23, 2009 - 16:30 , Location: Skiles 255 , Zhiwu Lin , School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech , Organizer: Haomin Zhou
A plasma is a completed ionized gas. In many applications such as in nuclear fusion or astrophysical phenomena, the plasma has very high temperature and low density, thus collisions can be ignored. The standard kinetic models for a collisionless plasma are the Vlasov- Maxwell and Vlasov-Poisson systems. The Vlasov-Poisson system is also used to model galaxy dynamics, where a star plays the role of a particle. There exists infinitely many equilibria for Vlasov models and their stability is a very important issue in physics. I will describe some of my works on stability and instability of various Vlasov equilibria.
Monday, February 23, 2009 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 255 , Eric Rains , Caltech , Organizer: Plamen Iliev
Euler's beta (and gamma) integral and the associated orthogonal polynomials lie at the core of much of the theory of special functions, and many generalizations have been studied, including multivariate analogues (the Selberg integral; also work of Dixon and Varchenko), q-analogues (Askey-Wilson, Nasrallah-Rahman), and both (work of Milne-Lilly and Gustafson; Macdonald and Koornwinder for orthgonal polynomials). (Among these are the more tractable sums arising in random matrices/tilings/etc.) In 2000, van Diejen and Spiridonov conjectured a further generalization of the Selberg integral, going beyond $q$ to the elliptic level (replacing q by a point on an elliptic curve). I'll discuss two proofs of their conjecture, and the corresponding elliptic analogue of the Macdonald and Koornwinder orthogonal polynomials. In addition, I'll discuss a further generalization of the elliptic Selberg integral with a (partial) symmetry under the exceptional Weyl group E_8, and its relation to Sakai's elliptic Painlev equation.
Monday, February 23, 2009 - 13:00 , Location: Skiles 269 , , School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech , , Organizer: Stavros Garoufalidis
A cubic graph is a graph with all vertices of valency 3. We will show how to assign two numerical invariants to a cubic graph: its spectral radius, and a number field. These invariants appear in asymptotics of classical spin networks, and are notoriously hard to compute. They are known for the Theta graph, the Tetrahedron, but already unknown for the Cube and the K_{3,3} graph. This is joint work with Roland van der Veen: arXiv:0902.3113.
Monday, February 23, 2009 - 13:00 , Location: Skiles 255 , Tiejun Li , Peking University , Organizer: Haomin Zhou
The tau-leaping algorithm is proposed by D.T. Gillespie in 2001 for accelerating the simulation for chemical reaction systems. It is faster than the traditional stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA), which is an exact simulation algorithm. In this lecture, I will overview some recent mathematical results on tau-leaping done by our group, which include the rigorous analysis, construction of the new algorithm, and the systematic analysis of the error.
Series: Other Talks
Friday, February 20, 2009 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 269 , Igor Belegradek , School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech , Organizer: Igor Belegradek
Comparison geometry studies Riemannian manifolds with a given curvature bound. This minicourse is an introduction to volume comparison (as developed by Bishop and Gromov), which is fundamental in understanding manifolds with a lower bound on Ricci curvature. Prerequisites are very modest: we only need basics of Riemannian geometry, and fluency with fundamental groups and metric spaces. The second (2 hour) lecture is about Gromov-Hausdorff convergence, which provides a natural framework to studying degenerations of Riemannian metrics.
Friday, February 20, 2009 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 255 , Ernie Croot , School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech , Organizer: Prasad Tetali
In this work (joint with Derrick Hart), we show that there exists a constant c > 0 such that the following holds for all n sufficiently large: if S is a set of n monic polynomials over C[x], and the product set S.S = {fg : f,g in S}; has size at most n^(1+c), then the sumset S+S = {f+g : f,g in S}; has size \Omega(n^2). There is a related result due to Mei-Chu Chang, which says that if S is a set of n complex numbers, and |S.S| < n^(1+c), then |S+S| > n^(2-f(c)), where f(c) -> 0 as c -> 0; but, there currently is no result (other than the one due to myself and Hart) giving a lower bound of the quality >> n^2 for |S+S| for a fixed value of c. Our proof combines combinatorial and algebraic methods.
Friday, February 20, 2009 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 268 , Sergio Almada , School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech , Organizer:
The talk is based on a paper by Kuksin, Pyatnickiy, and Shirikyan. In this paper, the convergence to a stationary distribution is established by partial coupling. Here, only finitely many coordinates in the (infinite-dimensional) phase space participate in the coupling while the dynamics takes care of the other coordinates.
Friday, February 20, 2009 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 269 , Igor Belegradek , Ga Tech , Organizer: John Etnyre
Comparison geometry studies Riemannian manifolds with a given curvature bound. This minicourse is an introduction to volume comparison (as developed by Bishop and Gromov), which is fundamental in understanding manifolds with a lower bound on Ricci curvature. Prerequisites are very modest: we only need basics of Riemannian geometry, and fluency with fundamental groups and metric spaces. The second (2 hour) lecture is about Gromov-Hausdorff convergence, which provides a natural framework to studying degenerations of Riemannian metrics.