Seminars and Colloquia by Series

TBA by Alden Waters

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 15:04 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Alden WaterUnivesity of Paris

Tropical Scheme Theory

Series
Algebra Seminar
Time
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Noah GiansiricusaUC Berkeley
I'll discuss joint work with J.H. Giansiracusa (Swansea) in which we study scheme theory over the tropical semiring T, using the notion of semiring schemes provided by Toen-Vaquie, Durov, or Lorscheid. We define tropical hypersurfaces in this setting and a tropicalization functor that sends closed subschemes of a toric variety over a field with non-archimedean valuation to closed subschemes of the corresponding toric variety over T. Upon passing to the set of T-valued points this yields Payne's extended tropicalization functor. We prove that the Hilbert polynomial of any projective subscheme is preserved by our tropicalization functor, so the scheme-theoretic foundations developed here reveal a hidden flatness in the degeneration sending a variety to its tropical skeleton.

Multiplicity of solutions for non-local elliptic equations driven by the fractional Laplacian

Series
CDSNS Colloquium
Time
Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Xifeng SuBeijing Normal University
We consider the semi-linear elliptic PDE driven by the fractional Laplacian: \begin{equation*}\left\{%\begin{array}{ll} (-\Delta)^s u=f(x,u) & \hbox{in $\Omega$,} \\ u=0 & \hbox{in $\mathbb{R}^n\backslash\Omega$.} \\\end{array}% \right.\end{equation*}An $L^{\infty}$ regularity result is given, using De Giorgi-Stampacchia iteration method.By the Mountain Pass Theorem and some other nonlinear analysis methods, the existence and multiplicity of non-trivial solutions for the above equation are established. The validity of the Palais-Smale condition without Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition for non-local elliptic equations is proved. Two non-trivial solutions are given under some weak hypotheses. Non-local elliptic equations with concave-convex nonlinearities are also studied, and existence of at least six solutions are obtained. Moreover, a global result of Ambrosetti-Brezis-Cerami type is given, which shows that the effect of the parameter $\lambda$ in the nonlinear term changes considerably the nonexistence, existence and multiplicity of solutions.

Intertwinings, wave equations and growth models

Series
Job Candidate Talk
Time
Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Mykhaylo ShkolnikovBerkeley Univ
We will discuss a general theory of intertwined diffusion processes of any dimension. Intertwined processes arise in many different contexts in probability theory, most notably in the study of random matrices, random polymers and path decompositions of Brownian motion. Recently, they turned out to be also closely related to hyperbolic partial differential equations, symmetric polynomials and the corresponding random growth models. The talk will be devoted to these recent developments which also shed new light on some beautiful old examples of intertwinings. Based on joint works with Vadim Gorin and Soumik Pal.

Analyzing Phylogenetic Treespace

Series
Mathematical Biology Seminar
Time
Monday, January 6, 2014 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Katherine St. JohnLehman College, CUNY
Evolutionary histories, or phylogenies, form an integral part of much work in biology. In addition to the intrinsic interest in the interrelationships between species, phylogenies are used for drug design, multiple sequence alignment, and even as evidence in a recent criminal trial. A simple representation for a phylogeny is a rooted, binary tree, where the leaves represent the species, and internal nodes represent their hypothetical ancestors. This talk will focus on some of the elegant mathematical and computational questions that arise from assembling, summarizing, visualizing, and searching the space of phylogenetic trees, as well as delve into the computational issues of modeling non-treelike evolution.

Some metric properties of Houghton's groups

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, January 6, 2014 - 14:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Sean ClearyCUNY
Houghton's groups are a family of subgroups of infinite permutation groups known for their cohomological properties. Here, I describe some aspects of their geometry and metric properties including families of self-quasi-isomtries. This is joint work with Jose Burillo, Armando Martino and Claas Roever.

Incoherence and Synchronization in the Hamiltonian Mean Field Model

Series
CDSNS Colloquium
Time
Monday, January 6, 2014 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
James Meiss*Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado, Boulder
Synchronization of coupled oscillators, such as grandfather clocks or metronomes, has been much studied using the approximation of strong damping in which case the dynamics of each reduces to a phase on a limit cycle. This gives rise to the famous Kuramoto model. In contrast, when the oscillators are Hamiltonian both the amplitude and phase of each oscillator are dynamically important. A model in which all-to-all coupling is assumed, called the Hamiltonian Mean Field (HMF) model, was introduced by Ruffo and his colleagues. As for the Kuramoto model, there is a coupling strength threshold above which an incoherent state loses stability and the oscillators synchronize. We study the case when the moments of inertia and coupling strengths of the oscillators are heterogeneous. We show that finite size fluctuations can greatly modify the synchronization threshold by inducing correlations between the momentum and parameters of the rotors. For unimodal parameter distributions, we find an analytical expression for the modified critical coupling strength in terms of statistical properties of the parameter distributions and confirm our results with numerical simulations. We find numerically that these effects disappear for strongly bimodal parameter distributions. *This work is in collaboration with Juan G. Restrepo.

Random matrix theory and the informational limit of eigen-analysis

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, December 12, 2013 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Raj Rao NadakuditiUniversity of Michigan
Motivated by the ubiquity of signal-plus-noise type models in high-dimensional statistical signal processing and machine learning, we consider the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of finite, low rank perturbations of large random matrices. Applications in mind are as diverse as radar, sonar, wireless communications, spectral clustering, bio-informatics and Gaussian mixture cluster analysis in machine learning. We provide an application-independent approach that brings into sharp focus a fundamental informational limit of high-dimensional eigen-analysis. Building on this success, we highlight the random matrix origin of this informational limit, the connection with "free" harmonic analysis and discuss how to exploit these insights to improve low-rank signal matrix denoising relative to the truncated SVD.

Global regularity for water waves in two dimensions

Series
Job Candidate Talk
Time
Thursday, December 12, 2013 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Fabio PusateriPrinceton University
We will start by describing some general features of quasilinear dispersive and wave equations. In particular we will discuss a few important aspects related to the question of global regularity for such equations. We will then consider the water waves system for the evolution of a perfect fluid with a free boundary. In 2 spatial dimensions, under the influence of gravity, we prove the existence of global irrotational solutions for suitably small and regular initial data. We also prove that the asymptotic behavior of solutions as time goes to infinity is different from linear, unlike the 3 dimensional case.

Localization and delocalization in the Anderson model on random regular graphs

Series
Job Candidate Talk
Time
Tuesday, December 10, 2013 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Leander GeisingerPrinceton University
The Anderson model on a discrete graph is given by the graph Laplacian perturbed by a random potential. I study spectral properties of this random Schroedinger operator on a random regular graph of fixed degree in the limit where the number of vertices tends to infinity.The choice of model is motivated by its relation to two important and well-studied models of random operators: On the one hand there are similarities to random matrices, for instance to Wigner matrices, whose spectra are known to obey universal laws. On the other hand a random Schroedinger operator on a random regular graph is expected to approximate the Anderson model on the homogeneous tree, a model where both localization (characterized by pure point spectrum) and delocalization (characterized by absolutely continuous spectrum) was established.I will show that the Anderson model on a random regular graph also exhibits distinct spectral regimes of localization and of delocalization. One regime is characterized by exponential decay of eigenvectors. In this regime I analyze the local eigenvalue statistics and prove that the point process generated by the eigenvalues of the random operator converges in distribution to a Poisson process.In contrast to that I will also show that the model exhibits a spectral regime of delocalization where eigenvectors are not exponentially localized.

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