Jennifer Chayes (Microsoft Research) will be giving a public talk on November 02, 2017, as part of the Program on combinatorics and complexity hosted by the CMSA during AY17-18. The talk will be at 5:00pm in Askwith Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA. Title: Network Science: From the Online World to Cancer Genomics Abstract: Everywhere we turn these days, we find […]
On October 24, 2018, the CMSA hosted the second annual Ding Shum lecture. This event was made possible by the generous funding of Ding Lei and Harry Shum. Last year featured Leslie Valiant, who spoke on “learning as a Theory of Everything.” This year will feature Eric Maskin, who will speak on “How to Improve Presidential […]
On April 9 and 10, 2019 the CMSA hosted two lectures by Mina Aganagic (UC Berkeley). This was the second annual Math Science Lecture Series held in honor of Raoul Bott. The lectures took place in Science Center, Hall C “Two math lessons from string theory” […]
On April 18, 2019 Harvard CMSA hosted the inaugural Yip lecture. The Yip Lecture takes place thanks to the support of Dr. Shing-Yiu Yip. This year’s speaker was Peter Galison (Harvard Physics). The lecture was held from 4:00-5:00pm in Science Center, Hall A. https://youtu.be/BofWFoiKARQ
https://youtu.be/WEpgH5Anjdg?si=U1LMgvou7OAGE8K8 On October 22, 2019, the CMSA held the third annual Ding Shum lecture. Speaker: Ronald L. Rivest (MIT) Title: Election Security Ronald L. Rivest is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory […]
Robert Griess (University of Michigan) Title: My life and times with the sporadic simple groups Abstract: Five sporadic simple groups were proposed in 19th century and 21 additional ones arose during the period 1965-1975. There were many discussions about the nature of finite simple groups and how sporadic groups are placed in mathematics. While in mathematics grad […]
Camillo De Lellis (IAS) Title: Area-minimizing integral currents and their regularity Abstract: Caccioppoli sets and integral currents (their generalization in higher codimension) were introduced in the late fifties and early sixties to give a general geometric approach to the existence of area-minimizing oriented surfaces spanning a given contour. These concepts started a whole new subject which has […]
Harry Shum (Tsinghua University) Title: From Deep Learning to Deep Understanding Abstract: In this talk I will discuss a couple of research directions for robust AI beyond deep neural networks. The first is the need to understand what we are learning, by shifting the focus from targeting effects to understanding causes. The second is the need for a […]
Michael Freedman (Microsoft – Station Q) Title: A personal story of the 4D Poincare conjecture Abstract: The proof of PC4 involved the convergence of several historical streams. To get started: high dimensional manifold topology (Smale), a new idea on how to study 4-manifolds (Casson), wild “Texas” topology (Bing). Once inside the proof: there are three submodules: […]
Ralph Cohen (Stanford University) Title: Immersions of manifolds and homotopy theory Abstract: The interface between the study of the topology of differentiable manifolds and algebraic topology has been one of the richest areas of work in topology since the 1950’s. In this talk I will focus on one aspect of that interface: the problem of studying embeddings […]
Vyacheslav V. Shokurov (Johns Hopkins University) Title: Birational geometry Abstract: About main achievements in birational geometry during the last fifty years. Talk chair: Caucher Birkar Video
Yujiro Kawamata (University of Tokyo) Title: Kunihiko Kodaira and complex manifolds Abstract: Kodaira’s motivation was to generalize the theory of Riemann surfaces in Weyl’s book to higher dimensions. After quickly recalling the chronology of Kodaira, I will review some of Kodaira’s works in three sections on topics of harmonic analysis, deformation theory and compact complex surfaces. Each topic […]