During the 2023–24 academic year, the CMSA will be hosting a Member Seminar, organized by Iacopo Brivio, Tomer Ezra, and Benjamin McKenna,

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.

Event Series Member Seminar

On complete Calabi-Yau metrics and Monge-Ampere equations

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Freid Tong (Harvard CMSA) Title: On complete Calabi-Yau metrics and Monge-Ampere equations Abstract: Calabi-Yau metrics are central objects in K\"ahler geometry and also string theory. The existence of Calabi-Yau metrics on compact manifolds was answered by Yau in his solution of the Calabi conjecture, but the situation in the non-compact setting is much more delicate, and many questions related to the existence […]

Event Series Member Seminar

The spectrum of some nonlinear random matrices

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Benjamin McKenna (Harvard) Title: The spectrum of some nonlinear random matrices Abstract: Modern data science often requires one to consider "nonlinear random matrices," a broad term for random-matrix models whose construction involves a nonlinear function applied entrywise. Such models are typically far from classical random matrix theory, and in principle entrywise nonlinearities can affect the […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Symmetries and algebraicity in the flux landscape

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Damian van de Heisteeg (Harvard CMSA) Title: Symmetries and algebraicity in the flux landscape Abstract: In this talk I consider potentials coming from fluxes in string theory. The minima of these potentials trace out special loci in the moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifolds. I discuss the structure that underlies these minima from a Hodge-theoretic […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Integrability and Hidden Symmetries in Black Hole Dynamics

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Uri Kol (Harvard CMSA) Title: Integrability and Hidden Symmetries in Black Hole Dynamics Abstract: The last decade has produced a number of remarkable discoveries, such as the first direct observation of gravitational waves by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration and the first black hole image taken by the Event Horizon Telescope. These discoveries mark the beginning of a […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Contract Design in Combinatorial Settings

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Tomer Ezra (Harvard CMSA) Title: Contract Design in Combinatorial Settings Abstract: We study two combinatorial settings of the contract design problem, in which a principal wants to delegate the execution of a costly task. In the first setting, the principal delegates the task to an agent that can take any subset of a […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Symmetry in quantum field theory

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Dan Freed (Harvard Mathematics and CMSA) Title: Symmetry in quantum field theory Abstract: In joint work with Greg Moore and Constantin Teleman we show how ideas and techniques in topological field theory apply to the study of symmetry in quantum field theory. I will discuss how this came about, beginning with […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Modularity and Fibrations in Mirror Symmetry

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Chuck Doran (Harvard CMSA) Title: Modularity and Fibrations in Mirror Symmetry Abstract: We will introduce appearances of modularity in the study both of families of Calabi-Yau threefolds and of their enumerative invariants.  An important role is played by the structure of fibrations and the DHT fibration-degeneration mirror correspondence, which clarifies how these notions […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Phase diagram and confining strings in a minimal model of nematopolar matter

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Farzan Vafa Title: Phase diagram and confining strings in a minimal model of nematopolar matter Abstract: We investigate a minimal model of a nematopolar system. We analytically uncover a phase diagram consisting of a locked phase where the polar order and nematic order are locked, and unlocked phases which could be […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Global weak solutions of 3+1 dimensional vacuum Einstein equations 

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Puskar Mondal Title: Global weak solutions of 3+1 dimensional vacuum Einstein equations Abstract: It is important to understand if the `solutions' of non-linear evolutionary PDEs persist for all time or become extinct in finite time through the blow-up of invariant entities. Now the question of this global existence or finite time […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Member Seminar

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Sunghyuk Park, Harvard CMSA Title: 3D quantum trace map Abstract: I will speak about my recent work (joint with Sam Panitch) constructing the 3d quantum trace map, a homomorphism from the Kauffman bracket skein module of an ideally triangulated 3-manifold to its (square root) quantum gluing module, thereby giving a precise relationship […]

Event Series Member Seminar

On using ML for Economics

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Sergiy Verstyuk Title: On using ML for Economics Abstract: I will introduce some tools from the field of machine learning and discuss how they can be leveraged to get a fresh perspective on economics.