Member Seminar

Member Seminar Speaker: Benjamin McKenna Title: Random matrices and large deviations Abstract: We give a generalist overview of random matrices and their (a)typical behaviors. In recent years, classical results have been complemented by a variety of new ones, in both the math and physics literatures, whose proofs leverage connections with special integrals over matrix groups. Some of these […]

Member Seminar Speaker: Puskar Mondal (CMSA) Title: On the Breakdown of Einstein's Gravity Abstract: It is important to understand under which conditions, the solutions of non-linear hyperbolic PDEs break down in finite time. In the context of Einstein's gravity, this is very closely tied to naked singularity formation and Penrose's weak cosmic censorship conjecture. In this talk, […]

Member Seminar Speaker: Daniel Kapec (CMSA) Title: Black Holes as Quantum Systems Abstract: To an outside observer, a black hole appears to be an ordinary quantum mechanical system with finite entropy and highly chaotic internal dynamics. Nevertheless, the low-temperature thermodynamics of the Kerr black hole presents several puzzles. For instance, the leading order semiclassical approximation to the […]

Member Seminar Speaker: Iacopo Brivio (CMSA) Title: Extension of pluricanonical forms in positive and mixed characteristics Abstract: The geometry of a complex manifold $X$ is to a large extent determined by its pluricanonical forms, i.e. global sections of $(\Omega^{\dim X}_X)^{\otimes m}$ for $m\geq 0$. A famous theorem of Siu states that when $X\to D$ is a smooth […]

Member Seminar Speaker: Zi Yang Kang Title: Deformations of Landau-Ginzburg models and their fibers Abstract: In mirror symmetry, the dual object to a Fano variety is a Landau-Ginzburg model. Broadly, a Landau-Ginzburg model is quasi-projective variety Y with a superpotential function w, but not all such pairs correspond to Fano varieties under mirror symmetry, so a […]

Member Seminar Speaker: Aghil Alaee Title: A quasi-local mass in general relativity Abstract: One of the fundamental open problems in geometric analysis and mathematical relativity is constructing a (universal) energy/mass quantity to compute the energy/mass of a finite region of spacetime, which can include a star, black hole, or galaxy. We define a new gauge-independent quasi-local mass […]

Member Seminar Speaker: Samy Jelassi Title: An introduction to mixture of experts in deep learning Abstract: Scale has opened new frontiers in natural language processing – but at a high cost. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have been proposed as a path to even larger and more capable language models. They select different parameters for each incoming example. By […]

Member Seminar Speaker: Juven Wang Title: Open Problems in Physics and Novel Solutions from Math   Abstract: (1) How do neutrinos obtain tiny mass and oscillate between e, \mu, \tau three flavors? What consists of Dark Matter? What causes leptogenesis and baryogenesis? (2) Why the Parity Symmetry is violated in the weak interaction? How do we quantum mechanically regularize and […]

Member Seminar Speaker: Alejandro Poveda Title: On compactness phenomena Abstract: In this presentation I shall be preoccupied with compactness phenomena in set theory. Compactness is the phenomenon by which the local properties of a mathematical structure determine its global behavior. This phenomenon is intrinsic to the very architecture of the mathematical universe and manifests to us in a […]

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 […]