Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Ever since Eliashberg distinguished overtwisted from tight contact structures in dimension 3, there has been an ongoing project to determine which closed, oriented 3–manifolds support a tight contact structure, and on those that do, whether we can classify them. This thesis studies tight contact structures on an infinite family of hyperbolic L-spaces, which come from surgeries on the Whitehead link. We also present partial results on symplectic fillability on those manifolds.

Bluejeans link to meeting: https://bluejeans.com/855793422

Patterns represent the spatial or temporal regularities intrinsic to various phenomena in nature, society, art, and science. From rigid ones with well-defined generative rules to flexible ones implied by unstructured data, patterns can be assigned to a spectrum. On one extreme, patterns are completely described by algebraic systems where each individual pattern is obtained by repeatedly applying simple operations on primitive elements. On the other extreme, patterns are perceived as visual or frequency regularities without any prior knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. In this presentation, we aim at demonstrating some mathematical techniques for representing patterns traversing the aforementioned spectrum, which leads to qualitative analysis of the patterns’ properties and quantitative prediction of the modeled behaviors from various perspectives. We investigate lattice patterns from material science, shape patterns from computer graphics, submanifold patterns encountered in point cloud processing, color perception patterns applied in underwater image processing, dynamic patterns from spatial-temporal data, and low-rank patterns exploited in medical image reconstruction. For different patterns and based on their dependence on structured or unstructured data, we introduce suitable mathematical representations using techniques ranging from group theory to deep neural networks.

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In this thesis, our main goal is to use numerical simulations to study some quantities related to the growing set B(t). Motivated by prior works, we mainly study quantities including the boundary size, the hole size, and the location of each hole for B(t). We discuss the theoretical background of this work, the algorithm we used to conduct simulations, and include an extensive discussion of our simulation results. Our results support some of the prior conjectures and further introduce several interesting open problems.

This defense will be conducted on bluejeans, at https://bluejeans.com/611615950.

This thesis has four chapters. The first three concern the location of mass on spheres or projective space, to minimize energies. For the Columb potential on the unit sphere, this is a classical problem, related to arranging electrons to minimize their energy. Restricting our potentials to be polynomials in the squared distance between points, we show in the Chapter 1 that there exist discrete minimal energy distributions. In addition we pose a conjecture on discreteness of minimizers for another class of energies while showing these minimizers must have empty interior.

In Chapter 2, we discover that highly symmetric distributions of points minimize energies over probability measures for potentials which are completely monotonic up to some degree, guided by the work of H. Cohn and A. Kumar. We make conjectures about optima for a class of energies calculated by summing absolute values of inner products raised to a positive power. Through reformulation, these observations give rise to new mixed-volume inequalities and conjectures. Our numerical experiments also lead to discovery of a new highly symmetric complex projective design which we detail the construction for. In this chapter we also provide details on a computer assisted argument which shows optimality of the $600$-cell for such energies (via interval arithmetic).

In Chapter 3 we also investigate energies having minimizers with a small number of distinct inner products. We focus here on discrete energies, confirming that for small $p$ the repeated orthonormal basis minimizes the $\ell_p $-norm of the inner products out of all unit norm configurations. These results have analogs for simplices which we also prove. 

Finally, in Chapter 4 we show that real tight frames that generate lattices must be rational, and that the same holds for other vector systems with structured matrices of outer products. We describe a construction of lattices from distance transitive graphs which gives rise to strongly eutactic lattices. We discuss properties of this construction and also detail potential applications of lattices generated by incoherent systems of vectors.