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During the 2024–25 academic year, the CMSA will be hosting a Member Seminar, organized by Iacopo Brivio and Tomer Ezra.

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.

A quasi-local mass in general relativity

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

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 […]

An introduction to mixture of experts in deep learning

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

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 […]

Open Problems in Physics and Novel Solutions from Math

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

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 […]

On compactness phenomena

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

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 […]

Event Series Member Seminar

Anti-Iitaka conjecture in positive characteristic

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

CMSA Member Seminar Speaker: Iacopo Brivio (Harvard) Title: Anti-Iitaka conjecture in positive characteristic Abstract: Given a smooth projective variety, its Kodaira dimension kappa(K_X) is an important invariant that measures the rate of growth of m-pluricanonical forms as a function of m. It serves as an higher-dimensional generalization of the genus of a Riemann surface. If f : X […]

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 […]