Margaret Beck : Using global invariant manifolds to understand metastability in Burgers equation with small viscosity.
- Presentations ( 109 Views )Finding globally stable states can provide useful information about the behavior of solutions to PDEs: for any initial condition, the solution will eventually approach such a state. However, in some cases, the solution can exhibit long transients in its approach to the state. If the transient is long enough, it may be this behavior, rather than the limiting behavior, that is observed in numerical simulations or experiments. This is referred to as "metastability" and has been found, for example, in the 2D Navier-Stokes equations with small viscosity. A similar phenomenon has been seen in Burgers equation, which can be explained using global invariant manifolds. More precisely, it is shown that in terms of similarity, or scaling, variables there exists a one-dimensional global center manifold of stationary solutions. Through each of these fixed points there exists a one-dimensional, global, attractive, invariant manifold. Metastability corresponds to a fast transient in which solutions approach this 'metastable' manifold, followed by a slow decay along this manifold, and, finally, convergence to the globally stable state.
Ben Weinkove : Symplectic forms, Kahler metrics and the Calabi-Yau equation
- Presentations ( 158 Views )Yau's theorem on Kahler manifolds states that there exists a unique Kahler metric in every Kahler class with prescribed volume form. This has many applications in complex geometry. I will discuss symplectic manifolds. In a different direction, I will talk about the problem of existence of constant scalar curvature Kahler metrics, which can also be considered a generalization of Yau's theorem.
Ellen Eischen : L-functions, congruences, and applications
- Presentations ( 168 Views )L-functions, certain meromorphic functions that include the Riemann zeta-function, encode important number-theoretic information. The first part of this talk will focus on some striking properties of special values of the Riemann zeta-function and certain other L-functions (namely, congruences modulo powers of a prime number). In the second part of the talk, I will introduce tools that are useful for studying these congruences. These tools have applications not only to number theory, but also to homotopy theory. This will be a colloquium style talk, intended for a broad audience.
Sam Stechmann : Clouds, climate, and extreme precipitation events: Asymptotics and stochastic
- Presentations ( 281 Views )Clouds and precipitation are among the most challenging aspects of weather and climate prediction. Moreover, our mathematical and physical understanding of clouds is far behind our understanding of a "dry" atmospheric where water vapor is neglected. In this talk, in working toward overcoming these challenges, we present new results on clouds and precipitation from two perspectives: first, in terms of the partial differential equations (PDEs) for atmospheric fluid dynamics, and second, in terms of stochastic models. A new asymptotic limit will be described, and it leads to new PDEs for a precipitating version of the quasi-geostrophic equations, now including phase changes of water. Also, a new energy will be presented for an atmosphere with phase changes, and it provides a generalization of the quadratic energy of a "dry" atmosphere. Finally, it will be shown that the statistics of clouds and precipitation can be described by stochastic differential equations and stochastic PDEs. As one application, it will be shown that, under global warming, the most significant change in precipitation statistics is seen in the largest events -- which become even larger and more probable -- and the distribution of event sizes conforms to the stochastic models.
Chris Wiggins : Data science @ the new york times
- Presentations ( 202 Views )Data science @ the new york times - what is data science? - where did it come from? - what does it mean at NYT? - what does it mean at Columbia? This is a public lecture targeted at a general audience. Undergraduates are particularly encouraged to come.
Jayce Getz : An approach to nonsolvable base change
- Presentations ( 198 Views )In the 1970's, inspired by the work of Saito and Shintani, Langlands gave a definitive treatment of base change for automorphic representations of the general linear group in two variables along prime degree extensions of number fields. To give some idea of the depth and utility of his work, one need only remark that some consequences of it were crucial in Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem. In this talk we will report on work in progress on base change for automorphic representations of GL(2) along nonsolvable Galois extensions of number fields. We will attempt to explain this assuming only a little algebraic number theory.
Dragos Oprea : Theta divisors on moduli spaces of bundles over curves
- Presentations ( 163 Views )The Jacobian of any compact Riemann surface carries a natural theta divisor, which can be defined as the zero locus of an explicit function, the Riemann theta function. I will describe a generalization of this idea, which starts by replacing the Jacobian with the moduli space of higher rank bundles. These moduli spaces also carry theta divisors, described via "generalized" theta functions. In this talk, I will describe recent progress in the study of generalized theta functions.
Matthias Heymann : Computing maximum likelihood paths of rare transition events, and applications to synthetic biology
- Presentations ( 163 Views )Dynamical systems with small noise (e.g. SDEs) allow for rare transitions from one stable state into another that would not be possible without the presence of noise. Large deviation theory provides the means to analyze both the frequency of these transitions and the maximum likelihood transition path. The key object for the determination of both is the quasipotential, V(x,y) = inf S_T(phi), where S_T(phi) is the action functional associated to the system, and where the infimum is taken over all T>0 and all paths phi:[0,T]->R^n leading from x to y. The numerical evaluation of V(x,y) however is made difficult by the fact that in most cases of interest no minimizer exists.
In my work I prove an alternative geometric formulation of V(x,y) that resolves this issue by introducing an action on the space of curves ( i.e. this action is independent of the parametrization of phi). In this formulation, a minimizer exists, and we use it to build a flexible algorithm (the geometric minimum action method, gMAM) for finding the maximum likelihood transition curve.
In one application I show how the gMAM can be useful in the newly emerging field of synthetic biology: We propose a method to identify the sources of instabilities in (genetic) networks.
This work was done in collaboration with my adviser Eric Vanden-Eijnden and is the core of my PhD thesis at NYU.