During the 2025–26 academic year, the CMSA will be hosting a Member Seminar, organized by Iacopo Brivio and Lorenzo Riva.
This seminar will take place weekly on Fridays from 12:00–1:00 pm Eastern Time.
The schedule will be updated as talks are confirmed.
Member Seminar Speaker: Max Wiesner Title: Light strings, strong coupling, and the Swampland Abstract: In this talk, I will start by reviewing central ideas of the so-called Swampland Program. The Swampland Program aims to identify criteria that distinguish low-energy effective field theories, that can be consistently coupled to quantum gravity, from those theories that become inconsistent […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Daniel Junghans Title: AdS with Scale Separation Abstract: I will talk about Anti-de Sitter solutions in string theory with a parametric separation between the AdS curvature scale and the Kaluza-Klein scale. In particular, I will discuss recent progress on computing backreaction corrections in such solutions, and I will explain how to construct solutions without […]
Speaker: Bong Lian Title: Singular Calabi-Yau mirror symmetry Abstract: We will consider a class of Calabi-Yau varieties given by cyclic branched covers of a fixed semi Fano manifold. The first prototype example goes back to Euler, Gauss and Legendre, who considered 2-fold covers of P1 branched over 4 points. Two-fold covers of P2 branched over […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Dan Lee Title: Survey on stability of the positive mass theorem Abstract: The Riemannian positive mass theorem states that a complete asymptotically flat manifold with nonnegative scalar curvature must have nonnegative ADM mass. This inequality comes with a rigidity statement that says that if the mass is zero, then the manifold must be Euclidean […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Matteo Parisi Title: Amplituhedra, Scattering Amplitudes and Triangulations Abstract: In this talk I will discuss about Amplituhedra – generalizations of polytopes inside the Grassmannian – recently introduced by physicists as new geometric constructions encoding interactions of elementary particles in certain Quantum Field Theories. In particular, I will explain how the problem of finding […]
Member Seminar Speaker:An Huang Title: Quadratic reciprocity from a family of adelic conformal field theories Abstract: This talk aims to provide a physics framework to understand quadratic reciprocity. Specifically, we consider a deformation of the two-dimensional free scalar field theory by raising the Laplacian to a positive real power. It turns out that the resulting non-local […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Martin Lesourd Title: Positive Mass, Density, and Scalar Curvature on Noncompact Manifolds Abstract: I’ll describe some recent work spanning a couple of different papers on the topics mentioned in the title: Positive Mass, Density, and Scalar Curvature on Noncompact Manifolds. Two of these are with R. Unger, Prof. S-T. Yau, and two others are with R. Unger, […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Yingying Wu Title: Moduli Space of Metric SUSY Graphs Abstract: SUSY curves are algebraic curves with additional supersymmetric or supergeometric structures. In this talk, I will present the construction of dual graphs of SUSY curves with Neveu–Schwarz and Ramond punctures. Then, I will introduce the concept of the metrized SUSY graph and […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Tsung-Ju Lee Title: Periods for singular CY families and Riemann–Hilbert correspondence Abstract: A GKZ system, introduced by Gelfand, Kapranov, and Zelevinsky, is a system of partial differential equations generalizing the hypergeometric structure studied by Euler and Gauss. The solutions to GKZ systems have been found applications in various branches of mathematics including number theory, algebraic geometry and […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Farzan Vafa Title: Diffusive growth sourced by topological defects Abstract: In this talk, we develop a minimal model of morphogenesis of a surface where the dynamics of the intrinsic geometry is diffusive growth sourced by topological defects. We show that a positive (negative) defect can dynamically generate a cone (hyperbolic cone). We […]
Speaker: Jörn Boehnke Title: Synthetic Regression Discontinuity: Estimating Treatment Effects using Machine Learning Abstract: In the standard regression discontinuity setting, treatment assignment is based on whether a unit’s observable score (running variable) crosses a known threshold. We propose a two-stage method to estimate the treatment effect when the score is unobservable to the econometrician while the […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Sergiy Verstyuk Title: Machine Learning the Gravity Equation for International Trade Abstract: We will go through modern deep learning methods and existing approaches to their interpretation. Next, I will describe a graph neural network framework. You will also be introduced to an economic analog of gravity. Finally, we will see how these […]