Interdisciplinary Science Seminar Speaker: Fouad El Baidouri, Broad Institute Title: The phenotype of the last universal common ancestor and the evolution of complexity Abstract: A fundamental concept in evolutionary theory is the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) from which all living organisms originated. While some authors have suggested a relatively complex LUCA it is still […]
Speaker: Kenichi Konishi (UNIPI.IT) Title: Anomalies, dynamics and phases in strongly-coupled chiral gauge theories: Recent developments Abstract: After many years of efforts, still very little is known today about the physics of strongly-coupled chiral gauge theories in four dimensions, in spite of an important role they might play in the physics of fundamental interactions beyond […]
Abstract: Introducing internal degrees of freedom in the description of crystalline insulators has led to a myriad of theoretical and experimental advances. Of particular interest are the effects of periodic perturbations, either in time or space, as they considerably enrich the variety of electronic responses. Here, we present a semiclassical approach to transport and accumulation […]
Abstract: The establishment of neural circuitry during early infancy is critical for developing visual, auditory, and motor functions. However, how cortical tissue develops postnatally is largely unknown. By combining T1 relaxation time from quantitative MRI and mean diffusivity (MD) from diffusion MRI, we tracked cortical tissue development in infants across three timepoints (newborn, 3 months, and 6 months). […]
CMSA Interdisciplinary Science Seminar Speaker: Sumit Sinha, Harvard University Title: Statistical Mechanical theory for spatio-temporal evolution of Intra-tumor heterogeneity in cancers: Analysis of Multiregion sequencing data (https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.10595) Abstract: Variations in characteristics from one region (sub-population) to another are commonly observed in complex systems, such as glasses and a collection of cells. Such variations are manifestations of heterogeneity, whose […]
A Conference in Honor of Elliott H. Lieb on his 90th Birthday On July 30 - Aug 1, 2022 the Harvard Mathematics Department and the CMSA co-hosted a birthday conference in honor of Elliott Lieb. This meeting highlights Elliott’s vast contribution to math and physics. Additionally, this meeting features Prof. Lieb’s more recent impact in […]
On August 2–5, the CMSA hosted a workshop on Phase Transitions and Topological Defects in the Early Universe. The workshop was held in room G10 of the CMSA, located at 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA and online via Zoom webinar. The next decade will see a wealth of new cosmological data, which can lead to new insights into […]
Interdisciplinary Science Seminar Speaker: Yang P. Liu Title: Recent Advances on Maximum Flows and Minimum-Cost Flows Abstract: We survey recent advances on computing flows in graphs, culminating in an almost linear time algorithm for solving minimum-cost flow and several other problems to high accuracy on directed graphs. Along the way, we will discuss intuitions from linear […]
Interdisciplinary Science Seminar Speaker: Yue M. Lu, Harvard University Title: Exploring and Exploiting the Universality Phenomena in High-Dimensional Estimation and Learning Abstract: Universality is a fascinating high-dimensional phenomenon. It points to the existence of universal laws that govern the macroscopic behavior of wide classes of large and complex systems, despite their differences in microscopic details. The notion of […]
Speaker: Haoyu Guo (Harvard) Title: Transport in large-N critical Fermi surface Abstract: A Fermi surface coupled to a scalar field can be described in a 1/N expansion by choosing the fermion-scalar Yukawa coupling to be random in the N-dimensional flavor space, but invariant under translations. We compute the conductivity of such a theory in two spatial […]
CMSA Interdisciplinary Science Seminar Speaker: Quanquan Liu, Northwestern University Title: Scalable Dynamic Graph Algorithms Abstract: The field of dynamic graph algorithms seeks to understand and compute statistics on real-world networks that undergo changes with time. Some of these networks could have up to millions of edge insertions and deletions per second. In light of these […]