• Swampland Program

    CMSA 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

    During the 2021–2022 academic year, the CMSA will host a program on the so-called “Swampland.” The Swampland program aims to determine which low-energy effective field theories are consistent with nonperturbative quantum gravity considerations. Not […]

  • CMSA Colloquium 9/15/2021 – 5/25/2022

    CMSA 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

    During the 2021–22 academic year, the CMSA will be hosting a Colloquium, organized by Du Pei, Changji Xu, and Michael Simkin. It will take place on Wednesdays at 9:30am – 10:30am (Boston time). The […]

  • General Relativity Program

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

    During the Spring 2022 semester, the CMSA hosted a program on General Relativity. This semester-long program included four minicourses,  a conference, and a workshop. General Relativity Mincourses: March–May, 2022 General […]

  • Holomorphic CFTs and topological modular forms

    Abstract: The theory of topological modular forms leads to many interesting constraints and predictions for two-dimensional quantum field theories, and some of them might have interesting implications for the swampland program. In […]

  • Invariant theory for maximum likelihood estimation

    Abstract:  I will talk about work to uncover connections between invariant theory and maximum likelihood estimation. I will describe how norm minimization over a torus orbit is equivalent to maximum […]

  • SYZ Conjecture beyond Mirror Symmetry

    Virtual

    Abstract: Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture is one of the guiding principles in mirror symmetry, which not only predicts the geometric structures of Calabi-Yau manifolds but also provides a recipe for mirror construction. Besides mirror […]

  • CMSA Colloquium

    During the 2021–22 academic year, the CMSA will be hosting a Colloquium, organized by Du Pei, Changji Xu, and Michael Simkin. It will take place on Wednesdays at 9:30am – 10:30am (Boston time). The […]

  • Tetrahedron instantons and M-theory indices

    Virtual

    Colloquium Speaker: Wenbin Yan (Tsinghua University) Title: Tetrahedron instantons and M-theory indices Abstract: We introduce and study tetrahedron instantons. Physically they capture instantons on $\mathbb{C}^{3}$ in the presence of the most general […]

  • Geodesics and minimal surfaces

    Abstract: There are several properties of closed geodesics which are proven using its Hamiltonian formulation, which has no analogue for minimal surfaces. I will talk about some recent progress in proving […]

  • Toward Demystifying Transformers and Attention

    Virtual

    https://youtu.be/MSw8HV0eHo8 Speaker: Ben Edelman, Harvard Computer Science Title: Toward Demystifying Transformers and Attention Abstract: Over the past several years, attention mechanisms (primarily in the form of the Transformer architecture) have revolutionized deep […]

  • Dihedral ridigity and mass

    Abstract: To characterise scalar curvature, Gromov proposed the dihedral rigidity conjecture which states that a positively curved polyhedron having dihedral angles less than those of a corresponding flat polyhedron should be […]