Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The talk will begin with an elementary geometric discussion of Riemann-Roch theory for sub-lattices of the integer lattice orthogonal to some positive vector. A pair of necessary and sufficient conditions for such a lattice to have the Riemann-Roch property will be presented. By studying a certain chip firing game on a directed graph related to the lattice spanned by the rows of its Laplacian I will describe a combinatorial method for checking whether a directed graph has the Riemann-Roch property. The talk will conclude with a presentation of arithmetical graphs, which after the application of a simple transformation, may be viewed as a special class of directed graphs. Examples from this class demonstrate that either, both or neither of the Riemann-Roch conditions may be satisfied for a directed graph. This is joint work with Arash Asadi.

In this talk we consider the collective dynamics of a network of interacting dynamical systems and show that under certain conditions such dynamical networks have a unique global attractor. This involves a combination of techniques from dynamical systems theory as well as newly devised methods in graph theory. However, this talk is intended to be an introduction to both areas of mathematics with a focus on how the combination of the two is yielding new results in graph and dynamical systems theory.

Statistical Process Control Charts are key tools in monitoring and controlling production processes to achieve conforming, high quality products. We will conduct a literature review on the Nonparametric Multivariate Statistical Process Control Charts to see what has been done in the area and how the methods have been applied.

In 1956 Mark Kac published his paper about the Foundation of Kinetic Theory in which he gave a mathematical, probabilistic description of a system of N particles colliding randomly. An interesting result that was found, though not causing any surprise, was the convergence to the stable equilibrium state. The question of the rate of the L2 convergence interested Kac and he conjectured that the spectral gap governing the convergence is uniformly bounded form below as N goes to infinity. While this was proved to be true, and even computed exactly, many situations show that the time scale of the convergence for very natural cases is proportional to N, while we would hope for an exponential decay. A different approach was considered, dealing with a more natural quantity, the entropy. In recent paper some advancement were made about evaluating the rate of change, and in 2003 Villani conjectured that the corresponding 'spectral gap', called the entropy production, is of order of 1/N. In our lecture we'll review the above topics and briefly discuss recently found results showing that the conjecture is essentially true.