Speaker: Richard Kenyon (Yale) Title: Dimers and webs Abstract: We consider SL_n-local systems on graphs on surfaces and show how the associated Kasteleyn matrix can be used to compute probabilities of various topological events involving the overlay of n independent dimer covers (or “n-webs”). This is joint work with Dan Douglas and Haolin Shi.

Abstract: The  low  dimensional  manifold  hypothesis  posits  that  the  data  found  in many applications, such as those involving natural images, lie (approximately) on low dimensional manifolds embedded in a high dimensional Euclidean space. In this setting, a typical neural network defines a function that takes a finite number of vectors in the embedding space as input.  However, one often […]

Speaker: Joel E. Cohen (Rockefeller University and Columbia University) Title: Fluctuation scaling or Taylor’s law of heavy-tailed data, illustrated by U.S. COVID-19 cases and deaths Abstract: Over the last century, ecologists, statisticians, physicists, financial quants, and other scientists discovered that, in many examples, the sample variance approximates a power of the sample mean of each of a set […]

Speaker: Rob Leigh, UIUC Title: Edge Modes and Gravity Abstract:  In this talk I first review some of the many appearances of localized degrees of freedom — edge modes —  in a variety of physical systems. Edge modes are implicated for example in quantum entanglement and in various topological and holographic dualities. I then review recent […]