While establishing various versions of the h-principle for contact distributions (Eliashberg (1989) in dimension 3, Borman-Eliashberg-Murphy (2015) in arbitrary dimension, and even-contact contact (D. McDuff, 1987) distributions are among the most remarkable advances in differential topology in the last four decades, very little is known about analogous results for other classes of distributions, e.g. generic distributions of corank 2 or higher. The smallest dimensional nontrivial case of corank 2 distributions is Engel distributions, i.e. the maximally nonholonomic rank 2 distributions on $4$-manifolds. This case is highly nontrivial and was treated recently by Casals-Pérez-del Pino-Presas (2017) and Casals-Pérez-Presas (2017). In my talk, I will show how to use the method of convex integration in order to establish all versions of the h-principle for corank 2 distributions of arbitrary odd rank satisfying a natural generic assumption on the associated pencil of skew-symmetric forms. During the talk, I will try to give all the necessary background related to the method of convex integration in principle. This is the joint work with Milan Jovanovic, Javier Martinez-Aguinaga, and Alvaro del Pino.

In the first part of the talk I will describe a general context which, in some specific situations, permits us to give a cohomological interpretation to the Langlands-Shahidi theory of L-functions. In the second part of the talk, I will specialize to the context of the general linear group over a totally imaginary base field F, and discuss some recent results of mine on the special values of Rankin-Selberg L-functions for GL(n) x GL(m) over such an F. The talk is based on my preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03393

We will give an explicit construction of the regular quotient of Morrissey-Ngô in the case of a symmetric pair. In the case of a quasisplit form (i.e. the regular centralizer group scheme is abelian), we will give a Galois description of the regular centralizer group scheme using parabolic covers. We will then describe how the nonseparated structure of the regular quotient recovers the spectral description of Hitchin fibers given by Schapostnik for U(n,n) Higgs bundles. This work is joint with B. Morrissey.

We ask the question, "how does the infinite q-Pochhammer symbol transform under modular transformations?" and connect the answer to that question to the Stark conjectures. The infinite q-Pochhammer symbol transforms by a generalized factor of automorphy, or modular 1-cocycle, that is analytic on a cut complex plane. This "Shintani-Faddeev modular cocycle" is an SL_2(Z)-parametrized family of functions generalizing Shintani's double sine function and Faddeev's noncompact quantum dilogarithm. We relate real multiplication values of the Shintani-Faddeev modular cocycle to exponentials of certain derivative L-values, conjectured by Stark to be algebraic units generating abelian extensions of real quadratic fields.

The three-dimensional higher-order structure of biomolecules determines their functionality. While assessing primary structure is fairly easily accessible, reconstruction of higher order structure is costly. It often requires elaborate correction of atomic clashes, frequently not fully successful. Using RNA data, we describe a purely statistical method, learning error correction, drawing power from a two-scale approach. Our microscopic scale describes single suites by dihedral angles of individual atom bonds; here, addressing the challenge of torus principal component analysis (PCA) leads to a fundamentally new approach to PCA building on principal nested spheres by Jung et al. (2012). Based on an observed relationship with a mesoscopic scale, landmarks describing several suites, we use Fréchet means for angular shape and size-and-shape, correcting within-suite-backbone-to-backbone clashes. We validate this method by comparison to reconstructions obtained from simulations approximating biophysical chemistry and illustrate its power by the RNA example of SARS-CoV-2.

This is joint work with Benjamin Eltzner, Kanti V. Mardia and Henrik Wiechers.

Literature:

Eltzner, B., Huckemann, S. F., Mardia, K. V. (2018): Torus principal component analysis with applications to RNA structure. Ann. Appl. Statist. 12(2), 1332?1359.

Jung, S., Dryden, I. L., Marron, J. S. (2012): Analysis of principal nested spheres. Biometrika, 99 (3), 551-568

Mardia, K. V., Wiechers, H., Eltzner, B., Huckemann, S. F. (2022). Principal component analysis and clustering on manifolds. Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 188, 104862, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X21001408

Wiechers, H., Eltzner, B., Mardia, K. V., Huckemann, S. F. (2021). Learning torus PCA based classification for multiscale RNA backbone structure correction with application to SARS-CoV-2. To appear in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C, bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.06.455406

Physicists Green, Russo, and Vanhove have discovered solution to differential equations involving automorphic forms appear at the coefficients to the 4-graviton scattering amplitude in type IIB string theory. Specifically, for \Delta the Laplace-Beltrami operator and E_s(g) a Langlands Eisenstein series, solutions f(g) of (\Delta-\lambda) f(g) = E_a(g) E_b(g) for a and b half-integers on certain moduli spaces G(Z)\G(R)/K(R) of real Lie groups appear as coefficients to the analytic expansion of the scattering amplitude. We will briefly discuss different approaches to finding solutions to such equations and focus on a shifted convolution sum of divisor functions which appears as the Fourier modes associated to the homogeneous part of the solution. Initially, it was thought that, when summing over all Fourier modes, the homogeneous solution would vanish but recently we have found an exciting error term. This is joint work with Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko and Ksenia Fedosova.