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.

The Langlands program is a far-reaching collection of conjectures that relate different areas of mathematics including number theory and representation theory. A fundamental problem on the representation theory side of the Langlands program is the construction of all (irreducible, smooth, complex) representations of certain matrix groups, called p-adic groups. In my talk I will introduce p-adic groups and provide an overview of our understanding of their representations, with an emphasis on recent progress. I will also briefly discuss applications to other areas, e.g. to automorphic forms and the global Langlands program.

A celebrated 19th century result of Cayley and Salmon is that a smooth cubic surface over the complex numbers contains exactly 27 lines. By contrast, over the real numbers, the number of real lines depends on the surface. A classification was obtained by Segre, but it is a recent observation of Benedetti-Silhol, Finashin-Kharlamov, Horev-Solomon and Okonek-Teleman that a certain signed count of lines is always 3. We extend this count to an arbitrary field k using an Euler number in A1-homotopy theory. The resulting count is valued in the Grothendieck-Witt group of non-degenerate symmetric bilinear forms. (No knowledge of A1-homotopy theory will be assumed in the talk.) This is joint work with Jesse Kass.

This technical talk will show live calculations in Mathematica 11 and other Wolfram technologies relevant to courses and research. Specific topics include: * Enter calculations in everyday English, or using the flexible Wolfram Language * Visualize data, functions, surfaces, and more in 2D or 3D * Store and share documents locally or in the Wolfram Cloud * Use the Predictive Interface to get suggestions for the next useful calculation or function options * Access trillions of bits of on-demand data * Use semantic import to enrich your data using Wolfram curated data * Easily turn static examples into mouse-driven, dynamic applications * Access 10,000 free course-ready applications * Utilize the Wolfram Language's wide scope of built-in functions, or create your own * Get deep support for specialized areas including machine learning, time series, image processing, parallelization, and control systems, with no add-ons required Current users will benefit from seeing the many improvements and new features of Mathematica 11 (https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-11/), but prior knowledge of Mathematica is not required.

Let M be a manifold with non-vanishing vectorfield. The homology of the space of loops in M carries a natural Lie bialgebra structure described by Sullivan as string topology operations. If M is a surface, these operations where originally defined by Goldman and Turaev. We study formal descriptions of these Lie bialgebras. More precisely, for surfaces these Lie bialgebras are formal in the sense that they are isomorphic (after completion) to their algebraic analogues (Schedler's necklace Lie bialgebras) built from the homology of the surface. For higher dimensional manifolds we give a similar description that turns out to depend on the Chern-Simons partition function.

This talk is based on joint work with A. Alekseev, N. Kawazumi, Y. Kuno and T. Willwacher.

I will discuss the influence of the seed in models of randomly growing trees; in particular, I will focus on the preferential attachment and uniform attachment models. In both of these models, different seeds lead to different distributions of limiting trees from a total variation point of view. I will discuss the differences and similarities in proving this for the two models. This is based on joint work with Sebastien Bubeck, Ronen Eldan, and Elchanan Mossel.

The Heegaard Floer package provides a robust tool for studying contact 3-manifolds and their subspaces. Within the sphere of Heegaard Floer homology, several invariants of Legendrian and transverse knots have been defined. The first such invariant, constructed by Ozsvath, Szabo and Thurston, was defined combinatorially using grid diagrams. The second invariant was obtained by geometric means using open book decompositions by Lisca, Ozsvath, Stipsicz and Szabo. We show that these two previously defined invariant agree. Along the way, we define a third, equivalent Legendrian/transverse invariant which arises naturally when studying transverse knots which are braided with respect to an open book decomposition.

In a recent paper, Brendle and Marques proved that on certain geodesic balls in the standard hemisphere, there does not exist small metric deformations of the standard metric which increase the scalar curvature in the interior and the mean curvature on the boundary. Such a result was motivated by the Euclidean and Hyperbolic positive mass theorems. More interestingly, this result is false on the hemisphere itself, which is shown by Brendle-Marques-Neves' remarkable counter example to the Min-Oo's conjecture. In this talk, we provide a few remarks to Brendle and Marques' theorem. We show that their theorem remains valid on slightly larger geodesic balls; it also holds on certain convex domains; moreover, with a volume constraint imposed, a variation of their theorem holds on the hemisphere. This is a joint work with Luen-Fai Tam.

A Diophantine equation is a polynomial equation in several variables, generally with integer coefficients, like x³ + y³ = z³. Provably finding all integer solutions of a Diophantine equation is a storied mathematical problem that is easy to state and notoriously difficult to solve. The method of Chabauty--Coleman is one particularly successful technique for ruling out extraneous solutions of a certain class of Diophantine equations. The method is p-adic in nature, and involves producing p-adic analytic functions that vanish on all integer-valued solutions. I will discuss work with Katz and Zureick-Brown on finding uniform bounds on the number of rational points on a curve of fixed genus, defined over a number field, subject to a (conjecturally weak) restriction on its Jacobian. The same technique also makes progress on the uniform Manin-Mumford conjecture on the size of torsion packets on curves of fixed genus.

Abstract: Representation stability is an exciting new area that combines ideas from commutative algebra and representation theory. The meta-idea is to combine a sequence of objects together using some newly defined algebraic structure, and then to translate abstract properties about this structure to concrete properties about the original object of study. Finite generation is a particularly important property, which translates to the existence of bounds on algebraic invariants, or some predictable behavior. I'll discuss some examples coming from topology (configuration spaces) and algebraic geometry (secant varieties).

In his 1932 paper, Eugene Wigner introduced the now famous Wigner function in order to compute quantum corrections to classical equilibrium distributions. We show how to extend this program and compute semiclassical approximations to quantum mechanical equilibrium distributions for slow, semiclassical degrees of freedom coupled to fast, quantum mechanical degrees of freedom. The main examples are molecules and electrons in crystalline solids. Where we will focus on the thermodynamics of the Hofstadter model as an application of the general results. The semiclassical formulas contain, in addition to quantum corrections similar to those of Wigner, also modifications of the classical Hamiltonian system used in the approximation: The classical energy and the Liouville measure on classical phase space turn out to have non-trivial-expansions in the semiclassical parameter. This talk is based on joint work with Stefan Teufel.

This work is motivated by a fundamental problem in sensor networks -- the need to aggregate redundant sensor data across a network. We focus on a simple problem of enumerating targets with a network of sensors that can detect nearby targets, but cannot identify or localize them. We show a clear, clean relationship between this problem and the topology of constructable sheaves. In particular, an integration theory from sheaf theory that uses Euler characteristic as a measure provides a computable, robust, and powerful tool for data aggregation.

More than 30 years ago, Schoen-Yau and later Witten made major breakthroughs in proving the positive mass theorem. It has become one of the most important theorems in general relativity and differential geometry. In the first part of the talk, I will introduce the positive mass theorem and present our recent work that extends the classical three-dimensional results to higher dimensions. In the second part, I will discuss how the observation from general relativity enables us to solve classical geometric problems related to the scalar curvature.

Integral equation methods are frequently used in the numerical solution of elliptic boundary value problems. After giving a brief overview of the advantages and disadvantages of such methods vis-a-vis more direct techniques like finite element methods, I will discuss two problems which arise in integral equation methods. In both cases, I take a contrarian position. The first is the discretization of integral operators on singular domains (e.g., surfaces with edges and curves with corners). The consensus opinion holds that integral equations given on such domains are exceedingly difficult to discretize and that sophisticated analysis, often specific to a particular boundary value problem, is required. I will explain that, in fact, the efficient solution of a broad class of such problems can be effected using an elementary approach. Exterior scattering problems given on planar domains with tens of thousands of corner points can be solved to 12 digit accuracy on my two year old desktop computer in a matter of hours. The second problem I will discuss is the evaluation of the singular integrals which arise form the discretization of weakly singular integral operators given on surfaces. Exponentially convergent algorithms for evaluating these integrals have been described in the literature and it is widely regarded as a "solved" problem. I will explain why this is not so and describe an approach which yields only algebraic convergence, but nonetheless performs better in practice than standard exponentially convergent methods.

This talk is motivated by the question "Given a stratified map, how are path components of the fiber organized?" Studying path components necessitates cosheaves, but the stratified assumption provides an elegant combinatorial description using MacPherson's entrance path category, which also controls the associated Leray sheaves. One of the goals of this talk will be to provide a self-contained exposition of these ideas, using a minimal amount of mathematical background. The talk will follow loosely a recent paper with Amit Patel, which is available on the arXiv as http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01587 Connections with applied topology will also be described.

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.

Calculation of portfolio loss distributions is an important part of credit risk management in all large banking institutions. Mathematically, this calculation is tantamount to efficiently computing the probability distribution of the sum of a very large number of correlated random variables. Typical Monte Carlo aggregation models apply brute force computation to this problem and suffer from two main drawbacks: lack of speed and lack of transparency for further credit risk analysis. I will describe an attempt to ameliorate these drawbacks via an asymptotic probabilistic method based on the Central Limit Theorem. I will next describe capital allocation, a process of attributing risk to individual transactions or subportfolios of a given portfolio. In so doing, I will state axioms for coherent risk measures. These axioms place the notion of risk measurement and diversification on a firm mathematical foundation. I will then describe axioms for capital allocation via coherent risk measures, and illustrate the ideas with efficient computational formulae for allocating capital based on a couple of commonly used risk measures. In the course of this talk, which will be geared towards graduate students, I will attempt to give a flavor of industrial research and role of applied mathematics in industry.

We will start by defining the Jones polynomial of a knot, and discussing some of its applications. We will then explain a refinement of the Jones polynomial, called Khovanov homology, and give some applications of this refinement. We will conclude by discussing a further refinement, called a Khovanov homotopy type; this part is joint work with Sucharit Sarkar.

"Finding and Measuring Stratified Spaces Using Persistent Intersection and Local Homology"