Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Homecoming 2014

Series
Other Talks
Time
Friday, October 31, 2014 - 16:00 for 5 hours
Location
North end of Tech Green
Speaker
Homecoming – Schools in the College of Sciences
This year's homecoming activities promise to be better than ever with all of the schools in the College of Sciences getting together to throw one big bash. Hear the CoS All-Star band, play casino and table games and take part in our photo contest. Come early to take a tour of science labs and hear faculty and students show-off their research. This is Halloween, so wear your costume to take part in the 2014 All Hallow's Eve Costume contest, if you wish. Come as your favorite costume, extra points for including some science in your get-up. There will be fabulous prizes, giveways and much, much more! Families, kids and guests are welcome. Those without an RSVP will still be able to purchase food, but for free food RSVP is required.

Embeddings of manifolds and contact manifolds III

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, October 31, 2014 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech

Please Note: This is the third of several talks discussing embeddings of manifolds. I will discuss some general results for smooth manifolds, but focus on embeddings of contact manifolds into other contact manifolds. Particular attention will be paid to embeddings of contact 3-manifolds in contact 5-manifolds. I will discuss two approaches to this last problem that are being developed jointly with Yanki Lekili.

What does it mean to be intelligent?

Series
Other Talks
Time
Thursday, October 30, 2014 - 19:00 for 2 hours
Location
Clary Theater
Speaker
Randy Engle – School of Psychology, Georgia Tech

Please Note: After the lecture, there will be a reception and time to chat with Engle and other guests.

During the next Frontiers in Science lecture, Randy Engle, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology, will talk about how the cultural and biological aspects of human intelligence differ from each other, and even change over a lifetime. Engle will discuss how biologically based intelligence is involved in our ability to pay attention and resist distractions. He’ll also discuss how socio-economic status plays a role. He’ll uncover some of the brain mechanisms and genetics involved, and talk about recent attempts, by such companies as Lumosity, to help people improve their fluid intelligence.

Lyapunov Functions: Towards an Aubry-Mather theory for homeomorphisms?

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, October 30, 2014 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Professor Albert Fathi – ENS-Lyon & IUF
This is a joint work with Pierre Pageault. For a homeomorphism h of a compact space, a Lyapunov function is a real valued function that is non-increasing along orbits for h. By looking at simple dynamical systems(=homeomorphisms) on the circle, we will see that there are systems which are topologically conjugate and have Lyapunov functions with various regularity. This will lead us to define barriers analogous to the well known Peierls barrier or to the Maסי potential in Lagrangian systems. That will produce by analogy to Mather's theory of Lagrangian Systems an Aubry set which is the generalized recurrence set introduced in the 60's by Joe Auslander (via transfinite induction) and a Maסי set which is essentially Conley's chain recurrent set. No serious knowledge of Dynamical Systems is necessary to follow the lecture.

Differential equations for colored triangulations

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Olivier Bernardi – Brandeis University
We will present the solution to a statistical mechanics model on random lattices. More precisely, we consider the Potts model on the set of planar triangulations (embedded planar graph such that every face has degree 3). The partition function of this model is the generating function of vertex-colored triangulations counted according to the number of monochromatic edges and dichromatic edges. We characterize this partition function by a simple system of differential equations. Some special cases, such as properly 4-colored triangulations, lead to particularly simple equations waiting for a more direct combinatorial explanation. This is joint work with Mireille Bousquet-Melou.

The Colored Jones Polynomial and the Volume Conjecture

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Jonathan Paprocki – Georgia Tech

Please Note: This is a project for Prof. Margalit's course on Low-dimensional Topology and Hyperbolic Geometry.

We will present an introduction to the notion of quantum invariants of knots and links, and in particular the colored Jones polynomial. We will also introduce the Volume Conjecture, which relates a certain limiting behavior of a quantum invariant (the colored Jones polynomial of a link) with a classical invariant (the hyperbolic volume of the hyperbolic part of a link complement in S^3) and has been proven in a number of cases.

Invariants of embeddings and immersions via contact geometry

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - 12:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Dr. John Etnyre – Georgia Tech Math Department
There is a beautiful idea that one can study spaces by studying associated geometric objects. More specifically one can associate to a manifold (that is some space) a symplectic or contact manifold (that is the geometric object). The question is how useful is this idea. We will discuss this idea and related questions for subspaces (that is immersions and embeddings) with a focus on curves in the plane and knots in three space. If time permits we will discuss powerful new tools from contact geometry that allow one use this idea to construct invariants of knots and more generally embeddings and immersions in any space.

Regularity of Solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi Equation on a Domain

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Albert Fathi – École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France
In this lecture, we will explain a new method to show that regularity on the boundary of a domain implies regularity in the inside for PDE's of the Hamilton-Jacobi type. The method can be applied in different settings. One of these settings concerns continuous viscosity solutions $U : T^N\times [0,+\infty[ \rightarrow R$ of the evolutionary equation $\partial_t U(x, t) + H(x, \partial_x U(x, t) ) = 0,$ where $T^N = R^N / Z^N$, and $H: T^N \times R^N$ is a Tonelli Hamiltonian, i.e. H(x, p) is $C^2$, strictly convex superlinear in p. Let D be a compact smooth domain with boundary $\partial D$ contained in $T^N \times ]0,+\infty[$ . We show that if U is differentiable at each point of $\partial D$, then this is also the case on the interior of D. There are several variants of this result in different settings. To make the result accessible to the layman, we will explain the method on the function distance to a closed subset of an Euclidean space. This example contains all the ideas of the general case.

Intuitive Dyadic Calculus

Series
Analysis Working Seminar
Time
Monday, October 27, 2014 - 16:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Robert Rahm – School of Math
We discuss an approach to dyadic lattices (and their applications to harmonic analysis) presented by Lerner and Nazarov in their manuscript, Intutive Dyadic Calculus.

On complexity of 3-manifolds/On coordinates on virtual braid groups

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 27, 2014 - 14:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Evgeny Fominykh and Andrei Vesnin – Chelyabinsk State University –
These are two half an hour talks.Evgeny's abstract: The most useful approach to a classication of 3-manifolds is the complexity theory foundedby S. Matveev. Unfortunately, exact values of complexity are known for few infinite seriesof 3-manifold only. We present the results on complexity for two infinite series of hyperbolic3-manifolds with boundary.Andrei's abstract: We define coordinates on virtual braid groups. We prove that these coordinates are faithful invariants of virtual braids on two strings, and present evidence that they are also very powerful invariants for general virtual braids.The talk is based on the joint work with V.Bardakov and B.Wiest.

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