Inside every eukaryotic cell is the nucleus, organelles, and the surrounding cytoplasm, which typically accounts for 50% of the cell volume. The cytoplasm is a complex mixture of water, protein, and a dynamic polymer network. Cells use cytoplasmic streaming to transmit chemical signals, to distribute nutrients, and to generate forces involved in locomotion. In this talk we present two different models related to cytoplasmic streaming in amoeboid cells. In the first part of the talk, we present a computational model to describe the dynamics of blebbing, which occurs when the cytoskeleton detaches from the cell membrane, resulting in the pressure-driven flow of cytosol towards the area of detachment and the local expansion of the cell membrane. The model is used to explore the relative roles in bleb dynamics of cytoplasmic viscosity, permeability of the cytoskeleton, and elasticity of the membrane and cytoskeleton. In the second part of the talk we examine how flow-induced instabilities of cytoplasm are related to the structural organization of the giant amoeboid cell Physarum polycephalum. We use a multiphase flow model that treats both the cytosol and cytoskeleton as fluids each with its own material properties and internal forces, and we discuss instabilities of the sol/gel mixture that produce flow channels within the gel. We analyze a reduced model and offer a new and general explanation for how fluid flow is involved in cytoskeletal reorganization.

When the heart tube first forms, the Reynolds number describing intracardial flow is only about 0.02. During development, the Reynolds number increases to roughly 1000. The heart continues to beat and drive the fluid during its entire development, despite significant changes in fluid dynamics. Early in development, the atrium and ventricle bulge out from the heart tube, and valves begin to form through the expansion of the endocardial cushions. As a result of changes in geometry, conduction velocities, and material properties of the heart wall, the fluid dynamics and resulting spatial patterns of shear stress and transmural pressure change dramatically. Recent work suggests that these transitions are significant because fluid forces acting on the cardiac walls, as well as the activity of myocardial cells which drive the flow, are necessary for correct chamber and valve morphogenesis.

In this presentation, computational fluid dynamics was used to explore how spatial distributions of the normal forces and shear stresses acting on the heart wall change as the endocardial cushions grow, as the Reynolds number increases, and as the cardiac wall increases in stiffness. The immersed boundary method was used to simulate the fluid-structure interaction between the cardiac wall and the blood in a simplified model of a two-dimensional heart. Numerical results are validated against simplified physical models. We find that the presence of chamber vortices is highly dependent upon cardiac cushion height and Reynolds number. Increasing cushion height also drastically increases the shear stress acting on the cushions and the normal forces acting on the chamber walls.

Simple models of classical particles, interacting via soft- or hard-core repulsive contact interactions, have been used to model a wide variety of granular and soft-matter materials, such as dry granular particles, foams, emulsions, non-Brownian suspensions, and colloids. Such materials display a variety of complex behaviors when in a state of steady shear driven flow. These include (i) Jamming: where the system transitions from a flowing liquid to a rigid but disordered solid as the particle packing increases; (ii) Shear Banding: where the system becomes spatially inhomogeneous, separating into distinct bands flowing at different sh ear strain rates; (iii) Discontinuous Shear Thickening: where the shear stress jumps discontinuously as the shear strain rate is increased. In this talk we will consider a simple numerical model of athermal soft-core interacting frictionless disks in steady state shear flow. We will show that the mechanism by which energy is dissipated plays a key role in determining the rheology of the system. For a model with a tangential viscous collisional dissipation, but no elastic friction, we will show that as the particle packing increases there is a sharp first order phase transition from a region of Bagnoldian rheology (stress ~ strain-rate^2) to a region of Newtonian rheology (stress ~ strain-rate), that takes place below the jamming transition. In a phase diagram of varying strain-rate and packing fraction (or strain-rate and pressure) this first order rheological phase transition manifests itself as a coexistence region, consisting of coexisting bands of Bagnoldian and Newtonian rheology in mechanical equilibrium with each other. Crossing this coexistence region by increasing the strain-rate at fixed packing, we find that discontinuous shear thickening can result if the strain-rate is varied too rapidly for the system to relax to the true shear-banded steady state. We thus demonstrate that the rheology of simply interacting sheared disks can be considerably more complex than previously realized, and our model suggests a simple mechanism for both the phenomena of shear banding and discontinuous shear thickening in spatially homogeneous systems, without the need to introduce elastic friction.

In this talk I will describe the limiting properties Yang-Mills flow on a holomorphic vector bundle E, in the case where the flow does not converge. In particular I will describe how to determine the L^2 limit of the curvature endomorphism along the flow. This proves a sharp lower bound for the Hermitian-Yang-Mills functional and thus the Yang-Mills functional, generalizing to arbitrary dimension a formula of Atiyah and Bott first proven on Riemann surfaces. I will then explain how to use this result to identify the limiting bundle along the flow, which turns out to be independent of metric and uniquely determined by the isomorphism class of E.

Analyzing the motion of a small body is often done by making a point-particle approximation. This simplification is not entirely appropriate in general relativity since, roughly speaking, too much mass in too little space creates black holes. In place of point-particles one considers one-parameter families of space-time metrics $\gamma_\varepsilon$ in which $\varepsilon\to 0$ corresponds to a body shrinking to zero size. In addition, certain point-particle limit properties are imposed on $\gamma_\varepsilon$. While there are some examples of such metrics $\gamma_\varepsilon$ (e.g. Schwarzschild-de Sitter space-time), there is no general existence theorem for such space-times. This talk will discuss a gluing construction which produces initial data with desirable point-particle limit properties.

The Holographic principle---in the form of the AdS/CFT correspondence---suggests a relation between processes in quantum gravity and phenomena in ordinary quantum field theory. The old `sum over histories' semi-classical approach to quantum gravity can be revisited in this light, by studying various gravitational instantons in AdS. We show that the AdS/CFT correspondence may be extended to spaces which are only locally asymptotically AdS, by examining the properties of the AdS-Taub-NUT and AdS-Taub-Bolt spacetimes. We also use holography to show that spacetime topology change in quantum gravity is a unitary process, in contrast to suggestions in the old `sum over histories' literature.

We consider a biological learning model composed of coupled stochastic neural ensembles obeying a nonlinear gradient dynamics. The dynamics optimize a simple error criterion involving noisy observations provided by the environment, leading to a function that can be used to make decisions in the future. The uncertainty of the resulting decision function is characterized, and shown to be controlled in large part by trading off coupling strength (and/or network topology) against the ambient neuronal noise. Further connections with classical regularization notions in statistical learning theory will also be explored.

Self-exciting point processes are simple point processes that have been widely used in neuroscience, sociology, finance and many other fields. In many contexts, self-exciting point processes can model the complex systems in the real world better than the standard Poisson processes. We will discuss the Hawkes process, the most studied self-exciting point process in the literature. We will talk about the limit theorems and asymptotics in different regimes. Extensions to Hawkes processes and other self-exciting point processes will also be discussed.

In this talk, I will introduce the famous result by Gangl-Kaneko-Zagier about a family of period polynomial relations among double zeta value of even weight. Then I will generalize their result in various ways, from which we can see the appearance of modular forms in low levels. At the end, I will give a generalization of the Eichler-Shimura-Manin correspondence to the case of the space of newforms of level 2 and 3 and a certain period polynomial space.

Just as algebraic varieties with group actions admit quotients, we provide a quotient construction for D-modules with torus actions that is with several important properties in algebraic analysis. As an application, we apply tools from toric geometry to obtain new information about hypergeometric systems of PDEs studied by Gauss, Appell, and Lauricella, among others. In particular, we determine when such "Horn systems" are regular holonomic. This is joint work with Laura Felicia Matusevich and Uli Walther.

In the 70's Thurston and Winkelnkemper showed how an open book decomposition of a 3-manifold can be used to construct a contact structure. In 2000 Giroux showed that every contact structure on a 3-manifold can be obtained from that process. Ozsvath and Szabo used this fact to define an invariant of contact structures in their Heegaard Floer homology, providing an important new tool to study contact 3-manifolds. In joint work with Ko Honda and Will Kazez we describe a simple way to visualize this contact invariant and provide a generalization and some applications. When the contact manifold has boundary, we define an invariant of contact structure living in sutured Floer homology, a variant of Heegaard Floer homology for a manifold with boundary due to Andras Juhasz. We describe a natural gluing map on sutured Floer homology and show how it produces a (1+1)-dimensional TQFT leading to new obstructions to fillability.

I discuss recent work attempting to construct stable vacua of string theory without supersymmetry.

The study of surfaces with constant mean curvature (CMC) goes back to 1841 when Delaunay classified all CMC surfaces of revolution. There has been consistent work on finding CMC hypersurfaces in various ambient manifolds. In this talk, we will discuss some nice properties of CMC surfaces, and then the existence of CMC surfaces in the Schwarzschild, and in general, asymptotically flat manifolds.

In this talk, which is a continuation of Wednesday's lecture, we shall describe the natural candidate for the limit of the empirical measure of the eigenvalues of non-normal matrices, the so-called Brown measure. We will give some details about how to prove convergence towards such a limit, but also discuss the instability of such convergence.

I will review some basics of crystal bases for highest-weight representations for a semisimple Lie algebra. I will also point to some connections with number theory through Fourier coefficients of Eisenstein series, mostly in type A.

I will present the proof of the random homogenization of general coercive Hamiltonian in 1d with the form as H(p,x,\omega)=H(p)+V(x, \omega). Some interesting and complex phenomena associated with non-convex Hamiltonian will also be discussed. This is a joint work with Scott Armstrong and Hung Tran.

A remarkable model of stochastic coalescence arises from considering shock statistics in scalar conservation laws with random initial data. While originally rooted in the study of Burgers turbulence, the model has deep connections to statistics, kinetic theory, random matrices, and completely integrable systems. The evolution takes the form of a Lax pair which, in addition to yielding interesting conserved quantities, admits some rather intriguing exact solutions. We will describe several distinct derivations for the evolution equation and, time-permitting, discuss properties of the corresponding kinetic system. This talk consists of joint work with Govind Menon (Brown).

Abstract:One way to convince ourselves that no cooperation can evolve among defectors is via a simple yet one of the most famous games in all of game theory - the Prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game. The players of this game adopt one of the two strategies: a) a cooperator who pays a cost so that another individual can receive a benefit, or b) a defector who can receive benefits, but it has no cost as it does not deal out any benefits at all. As seen from this formulation, no rational individual would opt to be a cooperator. Yet, we can see cooperation everywhere around us and thus (assuming defectors were here first) there must exist at least one mechanism for its evolution. Nowak (2006, 2012) discusses several of such mechanisms, including the kin selection by which cooperation can spread if the benefits go primarily to genetic relatives. In this talk we will introduce a simple PD-like asymmetric matrix game and show how Hamilton’s rule can easily be recovered. We will also introduce a simple PD-like symmetric matrix game to model the evolution of cooperation via greenbeard mechanism, which can be seen as a special case of kin selection.

We study the physics of D6 branes wrapped on supersymmetric three-cycles in type IIA string theory. In particular, we argue that although the superpotential in the resulting field theories vanishes to all orders in \alpha', nonperturbative contributions (from disk instantons) should generically be present. We discuss how mirror symmetry can relate these to tree-level sigma model computations in some circumstances. We also present an illustration of the role that background closed string moduli play in the brane worldvolume theory.

Hyperkahler (HK) manifolds appear in many fields of mathematics, such as differential geometry, mathematical physics, representation theory, and algebraic geometry. Compact HK manifolds are one of the building blocks for algebraic varieties with trivial first Chern class and their role in algebraic geometry has grown immensely over the last 20 year. In this talk I will give an overview of the theory of compact HK manifolds and then focus on some of my work, including a recent joint work with R. Laza and C. Voisin.

Kapustin and Witten introduced interesting boundary value problems for magnetic monopoles on a Riemann surface times an interval. They described the moduli space of such solutions in terms of Hecke modifications of holomorphic bundles over the Riemann surface. I will explain this and prove existence and uniqueness for such monopoles.

Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KSDFT) is the most widely used electronic structure theory for molecules and condensed matter systems. Although KSDFT is often stated as a nonlinear eigenvalue problem, an alternative formulation of the problem, which is more convenient for understanding the convergence of numerical algorithms for solving this type of problem, is based on a nonlinear map known as the Kohn-Sham map. The solution to the KSDFT problem is a fixed point of this nonlinear map. The simplest way to solve the KSDFT problem is to apply a fixed point iteration to the nonlinear equation defined by the Kohn-Sham map. This is commonly known as the self-consistent field (SCF) iteration in the condensed matter physics and chemistry communities. However, this simple approach often fails to converge. The difficulty of reaching convergence can be seen from the analysis of the Jacobian matrix of the Kohn-Sham map, which we will present in this talk. The Jacobian matrix is directly related to the dielectric matrix or the linear response operator in the condense matter community. We will show the different behaviors of insulating and metallic systems in terms of the spectral property of the Jacobian matrix. A particularly difficult case for SCF iteration is systems with mixed insulating and metallic nature, such as metal padded with vacuum, or metallic slabs. We discuss how to use these properties to approximate the Jacobian matrix and to develop effective preconditioners to accelerate the convergence of the SCF iteration. In particular, we introduce a new technique called elliptic preconditioner, which unifies the treatment of large scale metallic and insulating systems at low temperature. Numerical results show that the elliptic preconditioner can effectively accelerate the SCF convergence of metallic systems, insulating systems, and systems of mixed metallic and insulating nature. (Joint work with Chao Yang)

Qualitatively new behavior often emerges when large numbers of similar entities are interacting at high densities, no matter how simple the individual components. One prototypical example is granular matter such as fine dry sand, where individual grains are solids. In this talk I will discuss several striking phenomena, including the formation of jets and their break-up into droplets, where large ensembles of grains behave very much like a liquid, except that they do so without apparent surface tension.

The analytic framework for estimating coefficients of a generating function is the same in many variables as in one variable: evaluate Cauchy's integral by manipulating the contour into a "standard" position. That being said, the geometry when dealing with several complex variables can be much more complicated. This talk, drawing on the recent book (with Mark Wilson) of the same title, surveys analytic methods for extracting asymptotics from multivariate generating functions. I will try to give an idea of the main pieces of the puzzle. In particular, I will try to explain in pictures the roles of Morse theory, complex algebraic geometry and hyperbolicity in the asymptotic evaluation of integrals.

In his letter, "Pursuing Stacks," Grothendieck advocated to Quillen for the use of "higher" categories to encode the higher homotopy of spaces. In particular, Grothendieck dreamt of realizing homotopy n-types as n-groupoids. This powerful idea both opened the field of higher dimensional algebra but also informed a paradigm in which the distinction between topology and algebra is blurred. Since then, work by Baez and Dolan among others further surveyed the landscape of higher categories and their relationship to topology. In this talk, we will explore this story, beginning with some definitions and examples of higher categories. We will then proceed to explain "the periodic table of higher categories" and the four central hypotheses of higher category theory. In particular, these give purely algebraic characterizations of homotopy types, manifolds, and generalized knots; and account for the general phenomena of stabilization in topology. No prerequisites beyond basic ideas in algebraic topology will be expected.

I review the homological mirror symmetry conjecture of Kontsevich and its relation with topological D-branes. This conjecture is nontrivial even for tori, which allows one to perform some interesting checks. It turns out that in the presence of a general B-field Kontsevich's conjecture must be modified. In particular, on the B-side, coherent sheaves on a Calabi-Yau must be replaced by coherent sheaves on a certain `noncommutative deformation' of the Calabi-Yau. By contrast, an algebraic description of the A-model branes, if it exists, should involve a noncommutative algebra even for a vanishing B-field.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are membrane receptors that play a pivotal role in the regulation of reproduction and behavior in humans. Upon binding to specific ligands, they trigger a local cAMP production. Activated receptor are then internalized to different endosomal compartments where they can continue signaling before being recycled or destroyed. Recent studies showed that the different pools of cAMP have different effect on the cell.
In the first part of the talk, I will present a piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) of intracellular signaling. The stochastic part of the model accounts for formation, coagulation, fragmentation and recycling of intracellular vesicles which contain the receptor, whereas the deterministic part of the model represents evolution of chemical reactions due to signaling activity of the receptor. We are interested in the existence of and convergence to a stationary measure. I will present different cases for which we were able to obtain results in this direction.
In the second part of the talk, I will present the numerical workflow (SBML, PEtab and PyPESTO) we use to fit ODEs model of GPCR signaling to longitudinal measure of chemical concentrations (BRET data).

Geometric evolution equations like the Ricci flow and the mean curvature flow play a central role in differential geometry. The main problem is to understand singularity formation. In this talk, I will discuss recent results which give a complete picture of all the possible limit flows in 2D mean curvature flow with positive mean curvature, and in 3D Ricci flow.