There are a number of situations in which rescaled interacting particle systems have been shown to converge to a reaction diffusion equation (RDE) with a bistable reaction term. These RDEs have traveling wave solutions. When the speed of the wave is nonzero, block constructions have been used to prove the existence or nonexistence of nontrivial stationary distributions. Here, we follow the approach in a paper by Etheridge, Freeman, and Pennington to show that in a wide variety of examples when the RDE limit has a bistable reaction term and traveling waves have speed 0, one can run time faster and further rescale space to obtain convergence to motion by mean curvature. This opens up the possibility of proving that the sexual reproduction model with fast stirring has a discontinuous phase transition, and that in Region 2 of the phase diagram for the nonlinear voter model studied by Molofsky et al there were two nontrivial stationary distributions.

A quiver is a finite directed graph. A quiver representation assigns a finite-dimensional vector space to each vertex, and a linear map between the corresponding spaces to each arrow. A fundamental role in the theory of quiver representations is played by Bernstein-Gelfand-Ponomarev reflection functors associated to every source or sink of a quiver. In joint work with H. Derksen and J. Weyman (based on an earlier joint work with R. Marsh and M. Reineke) we extend these functors to arbitrary vertices. This construction is based on a framework of quivers with potentials; their representations are quiver representations satisfying relations of a special kind between the linear maps attached to arrows. The motivations for this work come from several sources: superpotentials in physics, Calabi-Yau algebras, and cluster algebras. However, no special knowledge will be assumed in any of these subjects, and the exposition aims to be accessible to graduate students.

In the final lecture, I will propose how the Galois theory of periods should lead to a classification of periods by types. When applied to the set of Feynman integrals occurring in particle physics, experiments suggest the emergence of a `cosmic? Galois group of symmetries acting on the constants of high-energy physics.

The classical Euclidean problem studied by Bonnet in the 19th century was to determine whether, and in how many ways, a Riemannian surface can be isometrically embedded into Euclidean 3-space so that its mean curvature is a prescribed function. He found that, generically, specifying a metric and mean curvature admitted no solution but that there are special cases in which, not only are there solutions, but there are even 1-parameter families of distinct (i.e., mutually noncongruent) solutions. Much later, these ‘Bonnet surfaces’ were found to be intimately connected with integrable systems and Lax pairs. In this talk, I will consider the analogous problem in affine geometry: To determine whether, and in how many ways, a surface endowed with a Riemannian metric g and a function H can be immersed into affine 3-space in such a way that the induced Blaschke metric is g and the induced affine mean curvature is H. This affine problem is, in many ways, richer and more interesting than the corresponding Euclidean problem. I will classify the pairs (g,H) that display the greatest flexibility in their solution space and explain what is known about the (suspected) links with integrable systems and Lax pairs.

T-duality has long been well understood locally via the Buscher rules. Global T-duality in the presence of an arbitrary background is much more involved. It relates backgrounds of different topology and can be seen to map 'regular' or commutative geometries to noncommutative ones. I will give a brief overview of these attempts at studying T-duality and show how T-duality acts very naturally in the context of Hitchin's generalized geometry. I will show that T-duality is an automorphism of the Courant bracket in the most general sense and give an example. If time permits, I will discuss applications to Poisson-Lie T-duality.

TBD

The fields of evolution and population genetics are undergoing a renaissance, due to the abundance of sequencing data. On the other hand, the existing theories are often unable to explain the experimental findings. It is not clear what sets the time scales of evolution, whether for antibiotic resistance, an emergence of new animal species, or the diversification of life. The emerging picture of genetic evolution is that of a strongly interacting stochastic system with large numbers of components far from equilibrium. In this talk, I plan to focus on the clone competition and discuss the diversity of a random population that undergoes selection and recombination (sexual reproduction). Recombination reshuffles genetic material while selection amplifies the fittest genotypes. If recombination is more rapid than selection, a population consists of a diverse mixture of many genotypes, as is observed in many populations. In the opposite regime, selection can amplify individual genotypes into large clones, and the population reaches the so-called "clonal condensation". I hope to convince you that our work provides a qualitative explanation of clonal condensation. I will point out the similarity between clonal condensation and the freezing transition in the Random Energy Model of spin glasses. I will conclude with a summary of our present understanding of the clonal condensation phenomena and describe future directions and connections to statistical physics.

Striking advances in observational cosmology over the past two decades have ushered in a golden era in cosmology, where our focus has turned from what the universe is made of to why it has the form we observe. The leading theory capable of answering such a question, Superstring Theory, does not appear capable of being tested using conventional accelerator-based experiments, forcing us to be more creative in our goal to verify or dismiss it. Focusing on brane inflation as a string theory-inspired model of inflationary cosmology, I will review how the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will provide a deluge of high- precision data into otherwise inaccessible energy scales. These data include possible "Transplanckian" signatures in the power spectrum, indications of variable sound speed or extra dimensions in non- Gaussianity, or constraining the inflation model parameter space using polarization. I then describe how the production of cosmic (super)strings in brane inflation would provide an additional means to verify superstring theory, and which would yield much detailed information about the underlying theory parameters.

I will discuss the semi-classical Schrodinger equation with vector potentials, and its challenges in analysis and in numerical simulations. The time splitting spectral method method will be introduced to solve the equation directly, which is believed to have the optimal mesh strategy. Afterwards. a series of wave packet based approximation approaches will be introduced, like the Gaussian beam method, Hagedorn wave packets method and the Gaussian wave packet transformation method.

Khovanov homology and knot Floer homology are two knot invariants which are defined using very different techniques, with Khovanov homology having its roots in representation theory and knot Floer homology in symplectic geometry. However, they seem to contain a lot of the same topological data about knots. Rasmussen conjectured that this similarity stems from a spectral sequence from Khovanov homology to knot Floer homology. In this talk I will give a construction of this spectral sequence. The construction utilizes a recently defined knot homology theory HFK_2 which provides a framework in which the two theories can be related.

This talk is about complex analytic geometry, the field of mathematics concerned with complex manifolds and more generally with complex analytic spaces. The "curves" of the title are compact Riemann surfaces and the "surfaces" in the title are compact complex manifolds of dimension 2 over the complex numbers (and hence dimension 4 over the real numbers). The talk will explore the problem of constructing two dimensional complex manifolds by deforming known complex analytic spaces. It will focus on a single example. The talk should be quasi-accessible to anyone who has courses in Riemann surfaces and algebraic topology.

Studying how small inertial particles suspended in turbulent flows move relative to each other provides fundamental insights into their transport, mixing and collisions. These insights are crucial for tackling diverse problems ranging from droplet growth in warm clouds, to planetesimal formation through collisional aggregation in turbulent protoplanetary nebula. A deeper understanding of the relative motion of the particles can be obtained by investigating both their forward-in-time (FIT) and backward-in-time (BIT) dispersion. When FIT and BIT dispersion are different it signifies irreversibility, and since FIT and BIT dispersion are related to different problems, understanding the irreversibility is of fundamental and practical importance.
I will present new theoretical arguments and asymptotic predictions, along with results from Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of the governing equations, to show that inertial particle dispersion can be very strongly irreversible in turbulence, with BIT being much faster than FIT dispersion in 3-dimensional turbulence. The results also show that inertial particles can disperse much faster than fluid (interialess) particles. I will also present arguments, confirmed by DNS results, that in 2-dimensional turbulence the nature of the irreversibility and the direction of the particle energy fluxes can invert when the particle inertia exceeds a certain threshold. These results significantly advance our understanding of dispersion problems, and lead to new capabilities for predicting the effect of inertia on the rate at which particles spread out and mix together in turbulence, and the rate at which they collide.

The cohesive strength of granular materials is a consequence of either cohesive bonding (capillary bridging, van der Waals forces) between the grains or the action of a binding solid or liquid material in the pore space. I first discuss the constitutive framework of the plastic behavior of granular materials with internal variables pertaining to the granular fabric. Then, I show how cohesive granular systems can be simulated by different methods accounting for capillary or solid bonding and in the presence of a binding solid or liquid. Finally, I focus on two issues: (1) How does local granular disorder affects the scale-up of cohesive interactions? (2) What are the respective roles of adhesion and volume fraction in the case of binding materials?

Over the past decade, much attention has focused on the behavior of hydrophobic particles at interfaces. These systems are of interest to scientists and engineers, for example, due to their potential for stabilizing drops and emulsions via jamming. This seminar will focus on the behavior of particulate 'rafts' that form when a monolayer of particles are placed at an air- liquid interface. The particles interact with the underlying fluid to form a quasi two-dimensional solid. Such particulate rafts can support both tension and compression, and they buckle under sufficiently large compressive loads. When a drop of surfactant is introduced into the system, fracture networks develop in the rafts. The fracture process exhibits features observed in other elastic systems, such as crack kinking, crack branching, and crack arrest. Moreover, there is a clear coupling between the praft fracture and the diffusion of the surfactant on the surface and through the 'porous' liquid-particle monolayer. As such, one can draw analogies between this system and others where crack growth interacts with fluid flow or mass transport. The seminar will present recent work in modeling the diffusion of surfactant into particle raft systems and the resulting formation of fracture networks. We will present both discrete models that track the motion of individual particles, as well as a new continuum model for poro-chemo-elasticity. Results that reproduce some of the quantitative and qualitative aspects of recent experimental studies of these systems will also be shown.

Fluid-structure interactions exist in many aspects of our daily lives. Some biomedical engineering examples are blood flowing through a blood vessel and blood pumping in the heart. Fluid interacting with moving or deformable structures poses more numerical challenges for its complexity in dealing with transient and simultaneous interactions between the fluid and solid domains. To obtain stable, effective, and accurate solutions is not trivial. Traditional methods that are available in commercial software often generate numerical instabilities.

In this talk, a novel numerical solution technique, Immersed Finite Element Method (IFEM), is introduced for solving complex fluid-structure interaction problems in various engineering fields. The fluid and solid domains are fully coupled, thus yield accurate and stable solutions. The variables in the two domains are interpolated via a delta function that enables the use of non-uniform grids in the fluid domain, which allows the use of arbitrary geometry shapes and boundary conditions. This method extends the capabilities and flexibilities in solving various biomedical, traditional mechanical, and aerospace engineering problems with detailed and realistic mechanics analysis. Verification problems will be shown to validate the accuracy and effectiveness of this numerical approach. Several biomechanical problems will be presented: 1) blood flow in the left atrium and left atrial appendage which is the main source of blood in patients with atrial fibrillation. The function of the appendage is determined through fluid-structure interaction analysis, 2) examine blood cell and cell interactions under different flow shear rates. The formation of the cell aggregates can be predicted when given a physiologic shear rate.

In Markov chain Monte Carlo, a Markov chain is constructed whose limiting distribution is equal to some target distribution. While it is easy to build such chains, for some distributions the standard constructions can take exponentially long to come near that limit, making the chain torpidly mixing. When the limit is reached in polynomial time, the chain is rapidly mixing. Tempering is a technique designed to speed up the convergence of Markov chains by adding an extra temperature parameter that acts to smooth out the target distribution. In this talk I will present joint work with Dawn Woodard (Cornell) and Scott Schmidler (Duke) that give sufficient conditions for a tempering chain to be torpidly mixing, and a related (but different) set of conditions for the chain to be rapidly mixing.

We propose the following model of a random graph on $n$ vertices. Let F be a distribution in R_+^{n(n-1)/2} with a coordinate for every pair ij with 1 \le i,j \le n. Then G_{F,p} is the distribution on graphs with n vertices obtained by picking a random point X from F and defining a graph on n vertices whose edges are pairs ij for which X_{ij} \le p. The standard Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi model is the special case when F is uniform on the 0-1 unit cube. We determine basic properties such as the connectivity threshold for quite general distributions. We also consider cases where the X_{ij} are the edge weights in some random instance of a combinatorial optimization problem. By choosing suitable distributions, we can capture random graphs with interesting properties such as triangle-free random graphs and weighted random graphs with bounded total weight. This is joint work with Alan Frieze (CMU) and Juan Vera (Waterloo). The talk will be self-contained and no prior knowledge of random graphs is assumed.

In this talk, we will introduce a dynamic mathematical model that describes the interaction of the immune system with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Using optimal control theory, we will illustrate that optimal dynamic multidrug therapies can produce a drug dosing strategy that exhibits structured treatment interruption, a regimen in which patients are cycled on and off therapy. In addition, sensitivity analysis of the model including both classical sensitivity functions and generalized sensitivity functions will be presented. Finally, we will describe how stochastic estimation can be used to filter and estimate states and parameters from noisy data. In the course of this analysis it will be shown that automatic differentiation can be a powerful tool for this type of study.

We develop a version of the Kloosterman circle method with a bump function that is used to provide asymptotics for weighted representation numbers of positive definite integral quadratic forms. Unlike many applications of the Kloosterman circle method, we explicitly state some constants in the error terms that depend on the quadratic form. This version of the Kloosterman circle method uses Gauss sums, Kloosterman sums, Salié sums, and a principle of nonstationary phase. If time permits, we may discuss a potential application of this version of the Kloosterman circle method to a proof of a strong asymptotic local-global principle for certain Kleinian sphere packings.

This will be the last in his sequence of an introductory lecture on Hypocoercivity for Langevin dynamics. For those who have not attended the previous lectures and are familiar with Langevin dynamics, the talk should be accessible. We will continue our discussion on convergence to equilibrium for second-order Langevin dynamics using the Poincare approach. We'll recap convergence in H^1(\mu) and then we'll talk about the direct L^2(\mu) method of Dolbeault, Mouhot, and Schmeiser, also called the DMS approach.

Given a reductive group 𝐺 and some auxiliary data, one has the Hitchin fibration associated with the adjoint action of 𝐺 on Lie(𝐺), which is successfully used by B. C. Ngô to prove the endoscopic fundamental lemma for Lie algebras. Following the same idea, there is a group analogue called the multiplicative Hitchin fibration by replacing the Lie algebra with reductive monoids, and one can hope to directly prove the fundamental lemma at group level. This project is almost complete and we report the results so far. There are many new features that are not present in the additive case, among which is a pleasant surprise that there might be some strata in the support theorem that are not explained by endoscopy.

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.

This talk is an overview of my thesis work, which consists of 3 projects exploring the effect of multiscale structure on a class of interacting particle systems called weakly interacting diffusions. In the absence of multiscale structure, we have a collection of N particles, with the dynamics of each being described by the solution to a stochastic differential equation (SDE) whose coefficients depend on that particle's state and the empirical measure of the full particle configuration. It is well known in this setting that as N approaches infinity, the particle system undergoes the ``propagation of chaos,'' and its corresponding sequence of empirical measures converges to the law of the solution to an associated McKean-Vlasov SDE. Meanwhile, in our multiscale setting, the coefficients of the SDEs may also depend on a process evolving on a timescale of order 1/\epsilon faster than the particles. As \epsilon approaches 0, the effect of the fast process on the particles' dynamics becomes deterministic via stochastic homogenization. We study the interplay between homogenization and the propagation of chaos via establishing large deviations and moderate deviations results for the multiscale particles' empirical measure in the combined limit as N approaches infinity and \epsilon approaches 0. Along the way, we derive rates of homogenization for slow-fast McKean-Vlasov SDEs.

We consider an ensemble of N interacting particles modeled by a system of N stochastic differential equations (SDEs). The coefficients of the SDEs are taken to be such that as N approaches infinity, the system undergoes Kac’s propagation of chaos, and is well-approximated by the solution to a McKean-Vlasov Equation. Rare but possible deviations of the behavior of the particles from this limit may reflect a catastrophe, and computing the probability of such rare events is of high interest in many applications. In this talk, we design an importance sampling scheme which allows us to numerically compute statistics related to these rare events with high accuracy and efficiency for any N. Standard Monte Carlo methods behave exponentially poorly as N increases for such problems. Our scheme is based on subsolutions of a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) Equation on Wasserstein Space which arises in the theory of mean-field control. This HJB Equation is seen to be connected to the large deviations rate function for the empirical measure on the ensemble of particles. We identify conditions under which our scheme is provably asymptotically optimal in N in the sense of log-efficiency. We also provide evidence, both analytical and numerical, that with sufficient regularity of the solution to the HJB Equation, our scheme can have vanishingly small relative error as N increases.

In this talk, we will study strongly negative amphicheiral knots - a class of knots with symmetry. These knots provide torsion elements in the knot concordance group, which are less understood than infinite-order elements. We will introduce the half-Alexander polynomial, an equivariant version of the Alexander polynomial for strongly negative amphicheiral knots, focusing on its applications to knot concordance. In particular, I will show how it facilitated the construction of the first examples of non-slice amphicheiral knots of determinant one. This talk is based on joint work with Keegan Boyle.

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.

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.