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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231103T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231103T130000
DTSTAMP:20240227T113702Z
CREATED:20240227T113702Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240227T113702Z
UID:10002880-1699012800-1699016400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Deformations of Landau-Ginzburg models and their fibers
DESCRIPTION:Member Seminar \nSpeaker: Zi Yang Kang \nTitle: Deformations of Landau-Ginzburg models and their fibers \nAbstract: In mirror symmetry\, the dual object to a Fano variety is a Landau-Ginzburg model. Broadly\, a Landau-Ginzburg model is quasi-projective variety Y with a superpotential function w\, but not all such pairs correspond to Fano varieties under mirror symmetry\, so a very natural question to ask is: Which Landau-Ginzburg models are mirror to Fano varieties? In this talk\, I will discuss a cohomological characterization of mirrors of (semi-)Fano varieties\, focusing on the case of threefolds. I’ll discuss how this characterization relates to the deformation and Hodge theory of (Y\,w)\, and in particular\, how the classification of (semi-)Fano threefolds is related to questions about moduli spaces of lattice polarized K3 surfaces.
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/member-seminar-11323/
LOCATION:CMSA Room G10\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Member Seminar
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231106T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231106T173000
DTSTAMP:20240223T083208Z
CREATED:20240223T083208Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240223T083208Z
UID:10002838-1699288200-1699291800@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Impossibility results in classical dynamical systems
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Matthew Foreman (UC Irvine) \nTitle: Impossibility results in classical dynamical systems \nAbstract: In 1932\, motivated by questions in statistical and celestial mechanics\, von Neumann proposed classifying the statistical behavior of dynamical systems. In the 1960’s\, motivated by work of Poincaré\, Smale proposed classifying the qualitative behavior of dynamical systems.  These questions laid the groundwork for enormous amounts of work\, but the fundamental questions remain open. This talk shows that they are impossible to answer in a rigorous sense. The talk will discuss various kinds of impossibility results and describe how they apply to von Neumann’s program and Smale’s program. \n 
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/colloquium-11623/
LOCATION:CMSA Room G10\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CMSA-Colloquium-11.06.2023.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231107T123000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231107T133000
DTSTAMP:20240223T083628Z
CREATED:20240223T083628Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240223T083628Z
UID:10002839-1699360200-1699363800@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:CMSA Q and A Seminar 11/7/2023
DESCRIPTION:CMSA Q and A Seminar \nSpeakers: Michael Hopkins (Harvard Math) and Minhea Popa (Harvard Math) \nTopics: \nMike Hopkins: What are topological modular forms? \nMihnea Popa: What is the abundance conjecture and why should it to be true? \n 
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/cmsaqa_11723/
LOCATION:Common Room\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:CMSA Q&A Seminar
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231108T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231108T150000
DTSTAMP:20240222T095919Z
CREATED:20240222T095919Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240222T095919Z
UID:10002798-1699452000-1699455600@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Peano: Learning Formal Mathematical Reasoning Without Human Data
DESCRIPTION:New Technologies in Mathematics Seminar \nSpeaker: Gabriel Poesia\, Dept. of Computer Science\, Stanford University \nTitle: Peano: Learning Formal Mathematical Reasoning Without Human Data \nAbstract: Peano is a theorem proving environment in which a computational agent can start tabula rasa in a new domain\, learn to solve problems through curiosity-driven exploration\, and create its own higher level actions. Gabriel will describe the system\, present case studies on learning to solve simple algebra problems from the Khan Academy platform\, and describe work on progress on learning the Natural Number Game\, a popular introduction to theorem proving in Lean for mathematicians. \n 
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/nt-11823/
LOCATION:CMSA Room G10\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:New Technologies in Mathematics Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/NTM-11.08.2023.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231113T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231113T173000
DTSTAMP:20240223T081522Z
CREATED:20240223T081522Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240223T081522Z
UID:10002834-1699893000-1699896600@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Koszul duality in QFT
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Brian Williams (Boston University) \nTitle: Koszul duality in QFT \nAbstract: We will describe appearances of the algebraic phenomena of Koszul duality in the context of boundary conditions and defects in quantum field theory. Primarily motivated by topological string theory\, this point of view was pioneered by Costello and Li in their proposal for a twisted version of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Since then\, many important examples of (twisted) holographic dualities in string and M-theory have been studied in work of Costello\, Gaiotto\, Paquette and many others. I will survey some of these examples and some current work with Raghavendran and Saberi which uses this formalism to predict exceptional symmetries present in M-theory. \n 
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/colloquium-111323/
LOCATION:CMSA Room G10\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CMSA-Colloquium-11.13.2023.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231115T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231115T150000
DTSTAMP:20240222T095355Z
CREATED:20240222T094758Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240222T095355Z
UID:10002797-1700056800-1700060400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:On the Power of Forward pass through Transformer Architectures
DESCRIPTION:New Technologies in Mathematics Seminar \nSpeaker: Abhishek Panigrahi\, Dept. of Computer Science\, Princeton University \nTitle: On the Power of Forward pass through Transformer Architectures \nAbstract: Highly trained transformers are capable of interesting computations as they infer for an input. The exact mechanism that these models use during forward passes is an interesting area of study. This talk studies two interesting phenomena. \nIn the first half\, we explore how and why pre-trained language models\, specifically BERT of moderate sizes\, can effectively learn linguistic structures like parse trees during pre-training. Specifically\, using synthetic data through PCFGs\, we show how moderate-sized transformers can perform forward-backward parsing\, also known as the inside-outside algorithm\, during inference. We further understand the role of the pre-training loss for the model to learn to parse during pre-training. \nIn the second half\, we consider in-context learning of large language models\, where they learn to reason on the fly. An ongoing hypothesis is that transformers simulate gradient descent at inference to perform in-context learning. We propose the Transformer in Transformer (TinT) framework\, which creates explicit transformer architectures that can simulate and fine-tune a small pre-trained transformer model during inference. E.g. a 1.3B parameter TINT model can simulate and fine-tune a 125 million parameter model in a single forward pass. This framework suggests that large transformers might execute intricate sub-routines during inference\, and provides insights for enhancing their capabilities through intelligent design considerations. \n 
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/nt-111523/
LOCATION:CMSA Room G10\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:New Technologies in Mathematics Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/NTM-11.15.2023.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231117T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231117T130000
DTSTAMP:20240227T113251Z
CREATED:20240227T113236Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240227T113251Z
UID:10002879-1700222400-1700226000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:A quasi-local mass in general relativity
DESCRIPTION:Member Seminar \nSpeaker: Aghil Alaee \nTitle: A quasi-local mass in general relativity \nAbstract: One of the fundamental open problems in geometric analysis and mathematical relativity is constructing a (universal) energy/mass quantity to compute the energy/mass of a finite region of spacetime\, which can include a star\, black hole\, or galaxy. We define a new gauge-independent quasi-local mass and energy with respect to the Minkowski spacetime\, and show its relation to the Brown-York Hamilton-Jacobi analysis. A quasi-local proof of the positivity\, based on spacetime harmonic functions\, is given for admissible closed spacelike 2-surfaces which enclose an initial data set satisfying the dominant energy condition.  Rigidity is also established in that vanishing energy implies that the 2-surface arises from an embedding into Minkowski space\, and conversely\, the mass vanishes for any such surface. This is joint work with M. Khuri and S.T. Yau. \n 
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/member-seminar-111723/
LOCATION:CMSA Room G10\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Member Seminar
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231120T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231120T173000
DTSTAMP:20240223T080617Z
CREATED:20240223T080617Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240223T080617Z
UID:10002833-1700497800-1700501400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:The analytical challenges of connectomics
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Jeff W. Lichtman (Harvard University) \nTitle: The analytical challenges of connectomics \nAbstract: Recent progress in generating synapse-level maps of brains\, a field known as connectomics\, brings both opportunities and challenges. The upside is that the biophysical instantiation of memories\, behaviors\, and knowledge will soon be before us. The downside is that no one knows exactly how to make sense of this data. I will show what connectomics data sets are and attempt to explain why it is so difficult to unravel their meaning.
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/colloquium-112023/
LOCATION:CMSA Room G10\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CMSA-Colloquium-11.20.2023.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231127T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231127T173000
DTSTAMP:20240223T080018Z
CREATED:20240223T080018Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240223T080018Z
UID:10002831-1701102600-1701106200@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:What do topological dynamics\, combinatorics\, and model theory have in common?
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Dana Bartosova (University of Florida) \nTitle: What do topological dynamics\, combinatorics\, and model theory have in common? \nAbstract: A striking correspondence between dynamics of automorphism groups of countable first order structures and Ramsey theory of finitary approximation of the structures was established in 2005 by Kechris\, Pestov\, and Todocevic. Since then\, their work has been generalized and applied in many directions. It also struck a fresh wave of interest in finite Ramsey theory.  Many classes of finite structures are shown to have the Ramsey property by encoding their problem in a known Ramsey class and translating a solution back. This is often a case-by-case approach and naturally there is a great need for abstracting the process. There has been much success on this front\, however\, none of the tools captures every situation. We will discuss one such encoding via a model-theoretic notion of semi-retraction introduced by Lynn Scow in 2012. In a joint work\, we showed that a semi-retraction transfers the Ramsey property from one class of structures to another under quite general conditions. We compare semi-retractions to a category-theoretical notion of pre-adjunction revived by Mašulović in 2016. If time permits\, I will mention a transfer theorem of the Ramsey property from a class of finite structures to their uncountable ultraproducts\, which is an AIMSQuaRE project with Džamonja\, Patel\, and Scow.
URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/colloquium-112723/
LOCATION:CMSA Room G10\, CMSA\, 20 Garden Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CMSA-Colloquium-11.27.2023_Page_1.png
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