Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Minimal Energy and Maximal Polarization

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, October 31, 2013 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Ed SaffVanderbilt University
This talk deals with problems that are asymptotically related to best-packing and best-covering. In particular, we discuss how to efficiently generate N points on a d-dimensional manifold that have the desirable qualities of well-separation and optimal order covering radius, while asymptotically having a prescribed distribution. Even for certain small numbers of points like N=5, optimal arrangements with regard to energy and polarization can be a challenging problem.

Homological Stability of Groups

Series
Geometry Topology Student Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - 14:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Becca WinarskiGeorgia Tech
Let MCG(g) be the mapping class group of a surface of genus g. For sufficiently large g, the nth homology (and cohomology) group of MCG(g) is independent of g. Hence we say that the family of mapping class groups satisfies homological stability. Symmetric groups and braid groups also satisfy homological stability, as does the family of moduli spaces of certain higher dimensional manifolds. The proofs of homological stability for most families of groups and spaces follow the same basic structure, and we will sketch the structure of the proof in the case of the mapping class group.

Manifolds on the Verge of a Regularity Breakdown

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - 12:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Dr. Rafael de la LlaveSchool of Mathematics
In dynamical systems, the long term behavior is organized by invariant manifolds that serve as landmarks that organize the traffic. There are two main theorems (established around 40-60 years ago) that tell you that these manifolds persist under small perturbations: KAM theorem and the theory of normally hyperbolic manifolds. In recent times there have been constructive proofs of these results which also lead to effective algorithms which allow to explore what happens in the border of the applicability of the theorems. We plan to review the basic concepts and present the experimental results.

Incompressible Euler Equations III

Series
Dynamical Systems Working Seminar
Time
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 06
Speaker
Chongchun ZengGeorgia Tech
Incompressible Euler equation is known to be the geodesic flow on the manifold of volume preserving maps. In this informal seminar, we will discuss how this geometric and Lagrangian point of view may help us understand certain analytic and dynamic aspects of this PDE.

Floating-point shadowing for 2D saddle-connection

Series
CDSNS Colloquium
Time
Monday, October 28, 2013 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 202
Speaker
Dmitry TodorovChebyshev laboratory, Saint-Petersburg
There is known a lot of information about classical or standard shadowing. Itis also often called a pseudo-orbit tracing property (POTP). Let M be a closedRiemannian manifold. Diffeomorphism f : M → M is said to have POTPif for a given accuracy any pseudotrajectory with errors small enough can beapproximated (shadowed) by an exact trajectory. Therefore, if one wants to dosome numerical investiagion of the system one would definitely prefer it to haveshadowing property.However, now it is widely accepted that good (qualitatively strong) shad-owing is present only in hyperbolic situations. However it seems that manynonhyperbolic systems still could be well analysed numerically.As a step to resolve this contradiction I introduce some sort of weaker shad-owing. The idea is to restrict a set of pseudotrajectories to be shadowed. Onecan consider only pseudotrajectories that resemble sequences of points generatedby a computer with floating-point arithmetic.I will tell what happens in the (simplified) case of “linear” two-dimensionalsaddle connection. In this case even stochastic versions of classical shadowing(when one tries to ask only for most pseudotrajectories to be shadowed) do notwork. Nevertheless, for “floating-point” pseudotrajectories one can prove somepositive results.There is a dichotomy: either every pseudotrajectory stays close to the un-perturbed trajectory forever if one carefully chooses the dependence betweenthe size of errors and requested accuracy of shadowing, or there is always apseudotrajectory that can not be shadowed.

On filtrations of scissors congruence spectra

Series
Algebra Seminar
Time
Monday, October 28, 2013 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Inna ZakharevichIAS/University of Chicago
The scissors congruence group of polytopes in $\mathbb{R}^n$ is defined tobe the free abelian group on polytopes in $\mathbb{R}^n$ modulo tworelations: $[P] = [Q]$ if $P\cong Q$, and $[P \cup P'] = [P] + [P']$ if$P\cap P'$ has measure $0$. This group, and various generalizations of it,has been studied extensively through the lens of homology of groups byDupont and Sah. However, this approach has many limitations, the chief ofwhich is that the computations of the group quickly become so complicatedthat they obfuscate the geometry and intuition of the original problementirely. We present an alternate approach which keeps the geometry of theproblem central by rephrasing the problem using the tools of algebraic$K$-theory. Although this approach does not yield any new computations asyet (algebraic $K$-theory being notoriously difficult to compute) it hasseveral advantages. Firstly, it presents a spectrum, rather than just agroup, invariant of the problem. Secondly, it allows us to construct suchspectra for all scissors congruence problems of a particular flavor, thusgiving spectrum analogs of groups such as the Grothendieck ring ofvarieties and scissors congruence groups of definable sets. And lastly, itallows us to construct filtrations by filtering the set of generators ofthe groups, rather than the group itself. This last observation allows usto construct a filtration on the Grothendieck spectrum of varieties that does not (necessarily) exist on the ring.

Rogue waves: fantascience or reality?

Series
Applied and Computational Mathematics Seminar
Time
Monday, October 28, 2013 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Francesco G. FedeleGT Civil Eng and ECE
Rogue waves are unusually large waves that appear from nowhere at the ocean. In the last 10 years or so, they have been the subject of numerous studies that propose homoclinic orbits of the NLS equation, the so-called breathers, to model such extreme events. Clearly, the NLS equation is an asymptotic approximation of the Euler equations in the spectral narrowband limit and it does not capture strong nonlinear features of the full Euler model. Motivated by the preceding studies, I will present recent results on deep-water modulated wavetrains and breathers of the Hamiltonian Zakharov equation, higher-order asymptotic model of the Euler equations for water waves. They provide new insights into the occurrence and existence of rogue waves and their breaking. Web info: http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.0668

Tight small Seifert fibered manifolds

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 28, 2013 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Bulent TosunUniversity of Virginia
Contact geometry in three dimensions is a land of two disjoint classes ofcontact structures; overtwisted vs. tight. The former ones are flexible,means their geometry is determined by algebraic topology of underlying twoplane fields. In particular their existence and classification areunderstood completely. Tight contact structure, on the other hand, arerigid. The existence problem of a tight contact structure on a fixed threemanifold is hard and still widely open. The classification problem is evenharder. In this talk, we will focus on the classification of tight contactstructures on Seifert fibered manifolds on which the existence problem oftight contact structures was settled recently by Lisca and Stipsicz.

Progressions with a pseudorandom step

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Friday, October 25, 2013 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Elad HorevUniversity of Hamburg
An open problem of interest in combinatorial number theory is that of providing a non-ergodic proof to the so called polynomial Szemeredi theorem. So far, the landmark result in this venue is that of Green who considered the emergence of 3-term arithmetic progressions whose gap is a sum of two squares (not both zero) in dense sets of integers. In view of this we consider the following problem. Given two dense subsets A and S of a finite abelian group G, what is the weakest "pseudorandomness assumption" once put on S implies that A contains a 3-term arithmetic progressions whose gap is in S? We answer this question for G=Z_n and G = F_p^n. To quantify pseudorandomness we use Gowers norms.

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