Consider the number 61,917,364,224. What's so special about it? Nothing really comes to mind. But this exact number was crucial towards a two-sentence published paper that gave a counterexample to one of Euler's famous conjectures that tried to generalize Fermat's Last Theorem. I will discuss why we can't just assume conjectures from famous people are "obviously'' true.
Geometric measure theory (GMT), born in the 1960’s, is a generalization of calculus and differential geometry to the realm of “non-smooth” geometric objects. GMT helped solve Plateau’s Problem, posed in 1760(!) by Lagrange. I will tell you about the basic tools of GMT, its other success stories, its current avenues as a hot research area, and what doing research in GMT will look like for a young mathematician like you! Some amazing lemmas and theorems on the fly, but no proofs or technical discussions expected
Recently, the fractional Laplacian has received great attention in modeling complex phenomena that involve long-range interactions. However, the nonlocality of the fractional Laplacian introduces considerable challenges in both analysis and simulations. In this talk, I will present numerical methods to discretize the fractional Laplacian as well as error estimates. Compared to other existing methods, our methods are more accurate and simpler to implement, and moreover they closely resembles the central difference scheme for the classical Laplace operator.
Abstract:
Oscillatory and excitable cells are just two of many types of cells in your body. They interact with each other by sending pulses or voltage spikes. An excitable cell amplifies any input it receives, as long as the input is large enough while an oscillatory cell needs no input and generates a spontaneous rhythm. One can connect these cells and model how they interact using differential equations; in this talk, I will discuss what we have found.
Thack 627
I will continue my talk from last week. I will quickly review material from last week and then discuss examples of equivariant cohomology of smooth toric vatieties and flag varieties as well as the localization theorem. Finally, will discuss an application of the Chinese remainder theorem in this setting.
Abstract:
We will discuss applications of the Atiyah, Guillemin-Sternberg theorem, such as classification of toric manifolds, the Schur-Horn theorem, and a brief introduction about viewing Bernstein–Kushnirenko theorem via symplectic geometry.
In this talk I will briefly introduce Cartan decompositions of semisimple Lie groups/algebras with some applications to quantum systems. I will also discuss how Riemannian and sub-Riemannian geometry can be used to study the cut locus of control systems arising from these decompo- sitions, after passing to a singular quotient space.