During the 2025–26 academic year, the CMSA will be hosting a Colloquium series, organized by Tomer Ezra, Houcine Ben Dali, Francesco Mori, and Sunghyuk Park.
It will take place on Mondays from 4:30 – 5:30 pm (Eastern Time) in Room G10, CMSA, 20 Garden Street. All CMSA postdocs/members are required to attend the weekly CMSA Colloquium series as well as the weekly CMSA Members’ Seminars.
To subscribe to the CMSA Colloquium Mailing list, please visit this link.
The schedule will be updated as talks are confirmed.
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 […]
Speaker: Johannes Kleiner, LMU München Title: What is Mathematical Consciousness Science? Abstract: In the last three decades, the problem of consciousness – how and why physical systems such as the brain have conscious experiences – has received increasing attention among neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. Recently, a decidedly mathematical perspective has emerged as well, which is now […]
Abstract: The standard definition of symmetries of a structure given on a set S (in the sense of Bourbaki) is the group of bijective maps S to S, compatible with this structure. But in fact, symmetries of various structures related to storing and transmitting information (such as information spaces) are naturally embodied in various classes of loops […]
Speaker: Venkatesan Guruswami, UC Berkeley Title: Long common subsequences between bit-strings and the zero-rate threshold of deletion-correcting codes Abstract: Suppose we transmit n bits on a noisy channel that deletes some fraction of the bits arbitrarily. What’s the supremum p* of deletion fractions that can be corrected with a binary code of non-vanishing rate? Evidently p* is at […]
Speaker: David Nelson, Harvard University Title: Statistical Mechanics of Mutilated Sheets and Shells Abstract: Understanding deformations of macroscopic thin plates and shells has a long and rich history, culminating with the Foeppl-von Karman equations in 1904, a precursor of general relativity characterized by a dimensionless coupling constant (the “Foeppl-von Karman number”) that can easily reach vK […]
Colloquium Speaker: Yannai Gonczarowski (Harvard) Title: Strategyproof-Exposing Mechanisms Descriptions Abstract: One of the crowning achievements of the field of Mechanism Design has been the design and usage of the so-called "Deferred Acceptance" matching algorithm. Designed in 1962 and awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012, this algorithm has been used around the world in settings ranging […]
Colloquium Speaker: Melody Chan, Brown Title: Moduli spaces of graphs Abstract: A metric graph is a graph—a finite network of vertices and edges—together with a prescription of a positive real length on each edge. I'll use the term "moduli space of graphs" to refer to certain combinatorial spaces—think simplicial complexes—that furnish parameter spaces for metric […]
Colloquium Speaker: Dima Sinapova (Rutgers University) Title: The Tree Property and uncountable cardinals Abstract: In the late 19th century Cantor discovered that there are different levels of infinity. More precisely he showed that there is no bijection between the natural numbers and the real numbers, meaning that the reals are uncountable. He then went on […]
https://youtu.be/-Kjl8WehIPw Colloquium Please note this colloquium will be held at a special time: 4:00-5:00 pm. Speaker: Subir Sachdev (Harvard) Title: Quantum statistical mechanics of charged black holes and strange metals Abstract: The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model was introduced as a toy model of interacting fermions without any particle-like excitations. I will describe how this toy model yields […]