Despite the impressive performance of rituximab (R) containing regimens like R-CHOP in CD20+ Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL), 30-60% of R-naïve NHL patients are estimated to be resistant, and approximately 60% of those patients will not respond to subsequent single agent R treatment. Given that antibody dependent cell mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) and phagocytosis (ADCP) are thought to be the major mechanisms of action of Rituximab, increasing the activation levels of natural killer (NK) and macrophage (MP) cells may be one strategy for overcoming R resistance.

During (and after) the Fields Institute Industrial Problem Solving Workshop in August 2019, academic participants and industry mentors developed and calibrated to literature data a quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) model of ADCC/ADCP to interrogate which mechanisms of R resistance could be overcome by increased NK or MP activation, and how much effector cell activation would be required to overcome a given degree and mechanism of R resistance.

This work was motivated by a real-world pharmaceutical drug development question, and the academic-industry interactions during and after the workshop resulted in sharknado plots as well as a published QSP model (presented at American Association of Cancer Research Annual Meeting, 2021) that was able to address some of the key questions around overcoming R resistance. The published model was then incorporated into an in-house QSP model supporting the development of a Takeda investigational drug which is being developed to restore R sensitivity in an R-resistant patient population.

The directed landscape is a random directed metric on the plane that is the scaling limit for models in the KPZ universality class. In this metric, typical pairs of points are connected by a unique geodesic. However, certain exceptional pairs are connected by more exotic geodesic networks. The goal of this talk is to describe a full classification for these exceptional pairs. I will also discuss some connections with other models of random geometry.

In this talk, I will present an overview of the framework originally proposed by Harder and further developed in collaboration with Raghuram to address rationality problems for special values of certain automorphic L-functions. I will then proceed to state my main results on the rationality of the special values of Langlands-Shahidi L-functions appearing in the constant term of the Eisenstein series associated with the exceptional group of type G_2​ over a totally imaginary number field. This study marks the first instance where rank-one Eisenstein cohomology is employed to investigate the arithmetic of automorphic L-functions in the presence of multiple L-functions.

Consider the lattice Z^2, and assign length 1 or 2 to every edge by flipping a series of independent fair coins. This gives a random weighted graph, and looking at distances in this graph gives a random planar metric. This model is expected to have a continuum scaling limit as we decrease the spacing between lattice points. Moreover, most natural models of random planar metrics and random interface growth (the so-called `KPZ universality class') are expected to converge to the same limiting geometry. The goal of this talk is to introduce this limit, known as the directed landscape, and describe at least one model where we can actually prove convergence.

For the past 25 years, a key player in contact topology has been the Floer-theoretic invariant called Legendrian contact homology. I'll discuss a package of new invariants for Legendrian knots and links that builds on Legendrian contact homology and is derived from rational symplectic field theory. This includes a Poisson bracket on Legendrian contact homology and a symplectic structure on augmentation varieties. Time permitting, I'll also describe an unexpected connection to cluster theory for a family of Legendrian links associated to positive braids. Parts of this are joint work in progress with Roger Casals, Honghao Gao, Linhui Shen, and Daping Weng.

The problem of determining the size and structure of the interior singular set of area-minimizing surfaces has been studied thoroughly in a number of different frameworks, with many ground-breaking contributions. In the framework of integral currents, when the surface has higher codimension than 1, the presence of singular points with flat tangent cones creates an obstruction to easily understanding the interior singularities. Until recently, little was known in this direction, particularly for surfaces of dimension higher than two, beyond Almgren’s celebrated dimension estimate on the interior singular set. In this talk I will discuss joint works with Camillo De Lellis and Paul Minter, where we establish (m-2)-rectifiability of the interior singular set of an m-dimensional area-minimizing integral current and classify tangent cones at \mathcal{H}^{m-2}-a.e. interior point.

The module theory of the Weyl algebra, known as the theory of $D$-modules, has profound applications in various fields. One of the most famous results is the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence, establishing equivalence between holonomic $D$-modules and perverse sheaves on smooth complex varieties. However, when dealing with singular varieties, such correspondence breaks down due to the non-simplicity of Weyl algebras on singular varieties. In our ongoing work, we introduce a new ring of differential operators on certain singular affine varieties, whose definition is analytically derived from harmonic analysis. It should contain the Weyl algebra as a proper subring and shares many properties with the Weyl algebra on smooth varieties. In the talk, after a brief review of the Weyl algebra, I will explain how the new ring of differential operators arises as a consequence of an explicit form of the Poisson summation conjecture and discuss its properties.

Directed polymers are a statistical mechanics model for random growth. Their partition functions are solutions to a discrete stochastic heat equation. This talk will discuss the logarithmic derivatives of the partition functions, which are solutions to a discrete stochastic Burgers equation. Of interest is the success or failure of the “one force-one solution principle” for this equation. I will reframe this question in the language of polymers, and share some surprising results that follow. Based on joint work with Louis Fan and Timo Seppäläinen.

In this talk I will describe my recent work with Mahesh Kakde on the Brumer-Stark Conjecture and certain refinements. I will give a broad overview that motivates the conjecture and gives connections to explicit class field theory. I will conclude with a description of recent work (joint w/ Kakde, Jesse Silliman, and Jiuya Wang) in which we complete the proof of the conjecture. Moreover, we deduce a certain special case of the Equivariant Tamagawa Number Conjecture, which has important corollaries. The key aspect of the most recent results, which allows us to handle the prime p=2, is the proof of a version of Ribet's Lemma in the case of characters that are congruent modulo p.

Motivated by G2-manifolds with coassociative fibrations in the adiabatic limit, Donaldson and Scaduto conjectured the existence of associative submanifolds homeomorphic to a three-holed 3-sphere with three asymptotically cylindrical ends in X \times R^3, where X is an A2-type ALE hyperkähler manifold. We prove this conjecture by solving a real Monge-Ampère equation with singular right hand side. The method produces many other asymptotically cylindrical U(1)-invariant special Lagrangians in X \times R^2, where X arises from the Gibbons-Hawking construction. This is joint work in progress with Saman Habibi Esfahani.

In this talk, we discuss the distributions of class groups of orders in number fields. We explain how studying such distributions is related to counting integral orbits having bounded invariants that lie inside the cusps of fundamental domains for coregular representations. We introduce two new methods to solve this counting problem, and as an application, we demonstrate how to determine the average size of the 2-torsion in the class groups of cubic orders. Much of this work is joint with Arul Shankar, Artane Siad, and Ila Varma.

We define an equivariant Lagrangian Floer theory on compact symplectic toric manifolds for the subtorus actions. We prove that the set of Lagrangian torus fibers (with weak bounding cochain data) with non-vanishing equivariant Lagrangian Floer cohomology forms a rigid analytic space. We can apply tropical geometry to locate such Lagrangian torus fibers in the moment map. We show that these Lagrangian submanifolds are nondisplaceable by equivariant Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms.

Ossian Bonnet (1819–1892) classified the surfaces in Euclidean 3-space that can be isometrically deformed without changing the mean curvature function H, showing that there are two types: the surfaces of constant mean curvature and a 4-dimensional ‘exceptional family’ (with variable mean curvature) that are now known as Bonnet surfaces. The corresponding problem in affine 3-space is much more difficult, and the full classification is still unknown. More than 10 years ago, I classified the affine surfaces that can isometrically deformed (with respect to the induced Blaschke metric) while preserving their affine mean curvature in a 3-dimensional family (the maximum dimension possible), showing that they depend on 2 functions of 1 variable in Cartan’s sense. When I gave a talk* in this seminar about these results on September 10, 2013, I only knew that these surfaces corresponded to pseudoholomorphic curves in a certain almost-complex surface. However, I have recently shown that the structure equations for these mysterious surfaces can be interpreted as describing holomorphic Legendrian curves in CP^3 subject to a natural positivity condition, and the integration corresponds to a flat sp(2,R) connection, i.e., they can be interpreted as a Lax pair, but of a very special kind, for which the integration can be effected explicitly. I’ll explain these results and use them to show how the classical problem of determining the affine surfaces with constant affine mean curvature and constant Gauss curvature of the Blaschke metric can be explicitly integrated, which, heretofore, was unknown. * https://www4.math.duke.edu/media/watch_video.php?v=6948e657e69cadbaa1a6915335e9ea87

I will propose a way to combine the theory of translation functors with the trace formula to study automorphic representations of connected semisimple anisotropic algebraic groups over the rational numbers whose Archimedean component is a limit of discrete series. I will explain the main ideas of the derivation of a trace formula which, modulo a conjecture on the decomposition of the tensor product of a limit of discrete series with a finite-dimensional representation into basic representations, allows to isolate the non-Archimedean parts of a finite family of C-algebraic automorphic representations containing the ones whose Archimedean component is a given limit of discrete series.

We discuss the following recent result of the speaker. Suppose a closed 3-manifold M has scalar curvature at least 1, and has nontrivial second homotopy group, and is not covered by the cylinder (S^2)*R. Then the pi_2-systole of M (i.e. the minimal area in the second homotopy group) is bounded by a constant that is approximately 5.44pi. If we include quotients of cylinder into consideration, then the best upper bound is weakened to 8_pi. This shows a topological gap in the pi_2-systolic inequality. We will discuss the ideas behind this theorem, as well as the proof using Huisken and Ilmanen’s weak inverse mean curvature flow.

Assouad-Nagata dimension addresses both large-scale and small-scale behaviors of metric spaces and is a refinement of Gromov’s asymptotic dimension. A metric space is a minor-closed metric if it is defined by the distance function on the vertices of an edge-weighted graph that satisfies a fixed graph property preserved under vertex-deletion, edge-deletion, and edge-contraction. In this talk, we determine the Assouad-Nagata dimension of every minor-closed metric. It is a common generalization of known results about the asymptotic dimension of H-minor free unweighted graphs, about the Assouad-Nagata dimension of complete Riemannian surfaces with finite Euler genus, and about their corollaries on weak diameter coloring of minor-closed families of graphs and asymptotic dimension of minor-excluded groups.

Integrable stochastic particle systems in one space dimension, like the Totally Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (TASEP), have been studied for over 50 years (introduced simultaneously in biology and mathematics in 1969-70). They strike a balance between being simple enough to be mathematically tractable and complicated enough to describe many interesting phenomena. Many natural questions about these systems can be generalized by introducing multiple parameters. The interplay between these parameters is powered by the Yang-Baxter equation, which brings new intriguing results to the well-traveled territory. In particular, I will discuss new Lax-type equations for the Markov semigroups of the TASEP and its relatives. Based on a joint work with Axel Saenz.