04-26-2016 Geometric Analysis Seminar
2016-04-26 16:38 (America/New_York)

04-27-2016 Random Matrix & Probability Theory Seminar
2016-04-27 16:42

04-27-2016 General Relativity Seminar
2016-04-27 16:44

04-28-2016 CMSA Special Seminar
2016-04-28 16:45

04-28-2016 Evolution Equations Seminar
2016-04-28 16:46

04-29-2016 CMSA Special Seminar
2016-04-29 16:49

05-02-2016 Mathematical Physics Seminar
2016-05-02 16:50

05-04-2016 General Relativity Seminar
2016-05-04 16:48

05-05-2016 Evolution Equations Seminar
2016-05-05 16:51

The Simons Collaboration Program in Homological Mirror Symmetry
2016-05-06 09:00 - 2016-05-08 17:00 | CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
The Simons Collaboration program in Homological Mirror Symmetry at Harvard CMSA and Brandeis University is part of the bigger Simons collaboration program on Homological mirror symmetry (https://schms.math.berkeley.edu) which brings to CMSA experts on algebraic geometry, Symplectic geometry, Arithmetic geometry, Quantum topology and mathematical aspects of high energy physics, specially string theory with the goal of proving the homological mirror symmetry conjecture (HMS) in full generality and explore its applications. Mirror symmetry, which emerged in the late 1980s as an unexpected physical duality between quantum field theories, has been a major source of progress in mathematics. At the 1994 ICM, Kontsevich reinterpreted mirror symmetry as a deep categorical duality: the HMS conjecture states that the derived category of coherent sheaves of a smooth projective variety is equivalent to the Fukaya category of a mirror symplectic manifold (or Landau-Ginzburg model). We are happy to announce that the Simons Foundation has agreed to renew funding for the HMS collaboration program for three additional years.
A brief induction of the Brandeis-Harvard CMSA HMS/SYZ research agenda and team members are as follows:

Directors:

Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard University)
Born in Canton, China, in 1949, S.-T. Yau grew up in Hong Kong, and studied in the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1966 to 1969. He did his PhD at UC Berkeley from 1969 to 1971, as a student of S.S. Chern. He spent a year as a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a year as assistant professor at SUNY at Stony Brook. He joined the faculty at Stanford in 1973. On a Sloan Fellowship, he spent a semester at the Courant Institute in 1975. He visited UCLA the following year, and was offered a professorship at UC Berkeley in 1977. He was there for a year, before returning to Stanford. He was a plenary speaker at the 1978 ICM in Helsinki. The following year, he became a faculty member at the IAS in Princeton. He moved to UCSD in 1984. Yau came to Harvard in 1987, and was appointed the Higgins Professor of Mathematics in 1997. He has been at Harvard ever since. Yau has received numerous prestigious awards and honors throughout his career. He was named a California Scientist of the Year in 1979. In 1981, he received a Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry and a John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, and was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1982, he received a Fields Medal for “his contributions to partial differential equations, to the Calabi conjecture in algebraic geometry, to the positive mass conjecture of general relativity theory, and to real and complex MongeAmpre equations”. He was named Science Digest, America’s 100 Brightest Scientists under 40, in 1984. In 1991, he received a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He was awarded a Crafoord Prize in 1994, a US National Medal of Science in 1997, and a China International Scientific and Technological Cooperation Award, for “his outstanding contribution to PRC in aspects of making progress in sciences and technology, training researchers” in 2003. In 2010, he received a Wolf Prize in Mathematics, for “his work in geometric analysis and mathematical physics”. Yau has also received a number of research fellowships, which include a Sloan Fellowship in 1975-1976, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984-1985. Yau’s research interests include differential and algebraic geometry, topology, and mathematical physics. As a graduate student, he started to work on geometry of manifolds with negative curvature. He later became interested in developing the subject of geometric analysis, and applying the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations to solve problems in geometry, topology, and physics. His work in this direction include constructions of minimal submanifolds, harmonic maps, and canonical metrics on manifolds. The most notable, and probably the most influential of this, was his solution of the Calabi conjecture on Ricci flat metrics, and the existence of Kahler-Einstein metrics. He has also succeeded in applying his theory to solve a number of outstanding conjectures in algebraic geometry, including Chern number inequalities, and the rigidity of complex structures of complex projective spaces. Yau’s solution to the Calabi conjecture has been remarkably influential in mathematical physics over the last 30 years, through the creation of the theory of Calabi-Yau manifolds, a theory central to mirror symmetry. He and a team of outstanding mathematicians trained by him, have developed many important tools and concepts in CY geometry and mirror symmetry, which have led to significant progress in deformation theory, and on outstanding problems in enumerative geometry. Lian, Yau and his postdocs have developed a systematic approach to study and compute period integrals of CY and general type manifolds. Lian, Liu and Yau (independently by Givental) gave a proof of the counting formula of Candelas et al for worldsheet instantons on the quintic threefold. In the course of understanding mirror symmetry, Strominger, Yau, and Zaslow proposed a new geometric construction of mirror symmetry, now known as the SYZ construction. This has inspired a rapid development in CY geometry over the last two decades. In addition to CY geometry and mirror symmetry, Yau has done influential work on nonlinear partial differential equations, generalized geometry, Kahler geometry, and general relativity. His proof of positive mass conjecture is a widely regarded as a cornerstone in the classical theory of general relativity. In addition to publishing well over 350 research papers, Yau has trained more than 60 PhD students in a broad range of fields, and mentored dozens of postdoctoral fellows over the last 40 years.

Professor Bong Lian (Brandeis University)
Born in Malaysia in 1962, Bong Lian completed his PhD in physics at Yale University under the direction of G. Zuckerman in 1991. He joined the permanent faculty at Brandeis University in 1995, and has remained there since. Between 1995 and 2013, he had had visiting research positions at numerous places, including the National University of Taiwan, Harvard University, and Tsinghua University. Lian received a J.S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. He was awarded a Chern Prize at the ICCM in Taipei in 2013, for his “influential and fundamental contributions in mathematical physics, in particular in the theory of vertex algebras and mirror symmetry.” He has also been co-Director, since 2014, of the Tsinghua Mathcamp, a summer outreach program launched by him and Yau for mathematically talented teenagers in China. Since 2008, Lian has been the President of the International Science Foundation of Cambridge, a non-profit whose stated mission is “to provide financial and logistical support to scholars and universities, to promote basic research and education in mathematical sciences, especially in the Far East.” Over the last 20 years, he has mentored a number of postdocs and PhD students. His research has been supported by an NSF Focused Research Grant since 2009. Published in well over 60 papers over 25 years, Lian’s mathematical work lies in the interface between representation theory, Calabi-Yau geometry, and string theory. Beginning in the late 80’s, Lian, jointly with Zuckerman, developed the theory of semi-infinite cohomology and applied it to problems in string theory. In 1994, he constructed a new invariant (now known as the Lian- Zuckerman algebra) of a topological vertex algebra, and conjectured the first example of a G algebra in vertex algebra theory. The invariant has later inspired a new construction of quantum groups by I. Frenkel and A. Zeitlin, as semi-infinite cohomology of braided vertex algebras, and led to a more recent discovery of new relationships between Courant algebroids, A-algebras, operads, and deformation theory of BV algebras. In 2010, he and his students Linshaw and Song developed important applications of vertex algebras in equivariant topology. Lian’s work in CY geometry and mirror symmetry began in early 90’s. Using a characteristic p version of higher order Schwarzian equations, Lian and Yau gave an elementary proof that the instanton formula of Candelas et al implies Clemens’s divisibility conjecture for the quintic threefold, for infinitely many degrees. In 1996, Lian (jointly with Hosono and Yau) answered the so-called Large Complex Structure Limit problem in the affirmative in many important cases. Around the same year, they announced their hyperplane conjecture, which gives a general formula for period integrals for a large class of CY manifolds, extending the formula of Candelas et al. Soon after, Lian, Liu and Yau (independently by Givental) gave a proof of the counting formula. In 2003, inspired by mirror symmetry, Lian (jointly with Hosono, Oguiso and Yau) discovered an explicit counting formula for Fourier-Mukai partners, and settled an old problem of Shioda on abelian and K3 surfaces. Between 2009 and 2014, Lian (jointly with Bloch, Chen, Huang, Song, Srinivas, Yau, and Zhu) developed an entirely new approach to study the so-called Riemann-Hilbert problem for period integrals of CY manifolds, and extended it to general type manifolds. The approach leads to an explicit description of differential systems for period integrals with many applications. In particular, he answered an old question in physics on the completeness of Picard-Fuchs systems, and constructed new differential zeros of hypergeometric functions.

Denis Auroux (Harvard University)
Denis Auroux’s research concerns symplectic geometry and its applications to mirror symmetry. While his early work primarily concerned the topology of symplectic 4-manifolds, over the past decade Auroux has obtained pioneering results on homological mirror symmetry outside of the Calabi-Yau setting (for Fano varieties, open Riemann surfaces, etc.), and developed an extension of the SYZ approach to non-Calabi-Yau spaces.After obtaining his PhD in 1999 from Ecole Polytechnique (France), Auroux was employed as Chargé de Recherche at CNRS and CLE Moore Instructor at MIT, before joining the faculty at MIT in 2002 (as Assistant Professor from 2002 to 2004, and as Associate Professor from 2004 to 2009, with tenure starting in 2006). He then moved to UC Berkeley as a Full Professor in 2009.
Auroux has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles, including several in top journals, and given 260 invited presentations about his work. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2005, was an invited speaker at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians, and in 2014 he was one of the two inaugural recipients of the Poincaré Chair at IHP. He has supervised 10 PhD dissertations, won teaching awards at MIT and Berkeley, and participated in the organization of over 20 workshops and conferences in symplectic geometry and mirror symmetry.

Senior Personnel:

Artan Sheshmani (Harvard CMSA)
Artan Sheshmani’s research is focused on enumerative algebraic geometry and mathematical aspects of string theory. He is interested in applying techniques in algebraic geometry, such as, intersection theory, derived category theory, and derived algebraic geometry to construct and compute the deformation invariants of algebraic varieties, in particular Gromov-Witten (GW) or Donaldson-Thomas (DT) invariants. In the past Professor Sheshmani has worked on proving modularity property of certain DT invariants of K3-fibered threefolds (as well as their closely related Pandharipande-Thomas (PT) invariants), local surface threefolds, and general complete intersection Calabi-Yau threefolds. The modularity of DT/PT invariants in this context is predicted in a famous conjecture of string theory called S-duality modularity conjecture, and his joint work has provided the proof to some cases of it, using degenerations, virtual localizations, as well as wallcrossing techniques. Recently, Sheshmani has focused on proving a series of dualities relating the various enumerative invariants over threefolds, notably the GW invariants and invariants that arise in topological gauge theory. In particular in his joint work with Gholampour, Gukov, Liu, Yau he studied DT gauge theory and its reductions to D=4 and D=2 which are equivalent to local theory of surfaces in Calabi-Yau threefolds. Moreover, in a recent joint work with Yau and Diaconescu, he has studied the construction and computation of DT invariants of Calabi-Yau fourfolds via a suitable derived categorical reduction of the theory to the DT theory of threefolds. Currently Sheshmani is interested in a wide range of problems in enumerative geometry of CY varieties in dimensions 3,4,5.
Artan has received his PhD and Master’s degrees in pure mathematics under Sheldon Katz and Thomas Nevins from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (USA) in 2011 and 2008 respectively. He holds a Master’s degree in Solid Mechanics (2004) and two Bachelor’s degrees, in Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. Artan has been a tenured Associate Professor of Mathematics with joint affiliation at Harvard CMSA and center for Quantum Geometry of Moduli Spaces (QGM), since 2016. Before that he has held visiting Associate Professor and visiting Assistant Professor positions at MIT.
An Huang (Brandeis University)
The research of An Huang since 2011 has been focused on the interplay between algebraic geometry, the theory of special functions and mirror symmetry. With S. Bloch, B. Lian, V. Srinivas, S.-T. Yau, X. Zhu, he has developed the theory of tautological systems, and has applied it to settle several important problems concerning period integrals in relation to mirror symmetry. With B. Lian and X. Zhu, he has given a precise geometric interpretation of all solutions to GKZ systems associated to Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in smooth Fano toric varieties. With B. Lian, S.-T. Yau, and C.-L. Yu, he has proved a conjecture of Vlasenko concerning an explicit formula for unit roots of the zeta functions of hypersurfaces, and has further related these roots to p-adic interpolations of complex period integrals. Beginning in 2018, with B. Stoica and S.-T. Yau, he has initiated the study of p-adic strings in curved spacetime, and showed that general relativity is a consequence of the self-consistency of quantum p-adic strings. One of the goals of this study is to understand p-adic A and B models.
An Huang received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2011. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Mathematics Department, and joined Brandeis University as an Assistant Professor in Mathematics in 2016.

Siu Cheong Lau (Boston University)
The research interest of Siu Cheong Lau lies in SYZ mirror symmetry, symplectic and algebraic geometry. His thesis work has successfully constructed the SYZ mirrors for all toric Calabi-Yau manifolds based on quantum corrections by open Gromov-Witten invariants and their wall-crossing phenomenon. In collaboration with N.C. Leung, H.H. Tseng and K. Chan, he derived explicit formulas for the open Gromov-Witten invariants for semi-Fano toric manifolds which have an obstructed moduli theory. It has a beautiful relation with mirror maps and Seidel representations. Recently he works on a local-to-global approach to SYZ mirror symmetry. In joint works with C.H. Cho and H. Hong, he developed a noncommutative local mirror construction for immersed Lagrangians, and a natural gluing method to construct global mirrors. The construction has been realized in various types of geometries including orbifolds, focus-focus singularities and pair-of-pants decompositions of Riemann surfaces.
Siu-Cheong Lau has received the Doctoral Thesis Gold Award (2012) and the Best Paper Silver Award (2017) at the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians. He was awarded the Simons Collaboration Grant in 2018. He received a Certificate of Teaching Excellence from Harvard University in 2014.

Affiliates:

Netanel Rubin-Blaier (Cambridge)
Kwokwai Chan (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Mandy Cheung (Harvard University, BP)
Chuck Doran (University of Alberta)
Hansol Hong (Yonsei University)
Shinobu Hosono (Gakushuin University, Japan)
Conan Leung (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Yu-Shen Lin (Boston University)
Hossein Movassati (IMPA Brazil)
Arnav Tripathhy (Harvard University, BP)

Postdocs:

Dennis Borisov
Tsung-Ju Lee
Dingxin Zhang
Jingyu Zhao
Yang Zhou

To learn about previous programming as part of the Simons Collaboration, click here.

Simons Collaboration on Homological Mirror Symmetry
2016-05-06 09:00 - 2016-05-08 17:00
The Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications will be hosting a 3-day workshop on Homological Mirror Symmetry and related areas on May 6 – May 8, 2016 at Harvard CMSA Building: Room G10 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Organizers:
D. Auroux, S.C. Lau, N.C. Leung, Bong Lian, C.C. Liu, S.T. Yau
Speakers:

Netanel Blaier (MIT)
Kwokwai Chan (CUHK)
Bohan Fang (Peking University)
Amanda Francis (BYU)
Hansol Hong (CUHK)
Heather Lee (Purdue University)
Si Li (Tsinghua University)
Yu-Shen Lin (Stanford University)
Alex Perry (Harvard University)
Hiro Tanaka (Harvard University)
Sara Tukachinsky (HUJ)
Michael Viscardi (MIT)
Eric Zaslow (Northwestern University)
Jingyu Zhao (Columbia University)

Please click here for the conference Main Website.
Please click Simons Workshop Schedule with Abstract for a downloadable schedule with talk abstracts.

Schedule:

May 6 – Day 1

9:00am
Breakfast

9:35am
Opening remarks

9:45am – 10:45am
Si Li, “Quantum master equation, chiral algebra, and integrability”

10:45am – 11:15am
Break

11:15am – 12:15pm
Sara Tukachinsky, “Point like bounding chains and open WDVV“

12:15pm – 1:45pm
Lunch

1:45pm – 2:45pm
Bohan Fang, “Mirror B model for toric Calabi Yau 3 folds“

2:45pm – 3:00pm
Break

3:00pm – 4:00pm
Hiro Tanaka, “Toward Fukaya categories over arbitrary coefficients“

4:00pm – 4:15pm
Break

4:15pm – 5:15pm
Hansol Hong, “Noncommutative mirror functors“

May 7 – Day 2

9:00am
Breakfast

9:45am – 10:45am
Eric Zaslow, “Lagrangian fillings what does the sheaf say?“

10:45am – 11:15am
Break

11:15am – 12:15pm
Alex Perry, “Derived categories of Gushel Mukai varieties“

12:15pm – 1:45pm
Lunch

1:45pm – 2:45pm
Amanda Francis, “A Landau Ginzburg mirror theorem inspired by Borcea Voisin symmetry“

2:45pm – 3:00pm
Break

3:00pm – 4:00pm
Heather Lee, “Homological mirror symmetry for open Riemann surfaces from pair of pants decompositions“

4:00pm – 4:15pm
Break

4:15pm – 5:15pm
Yu-Shen Lin, “Counting Holomorphic Discs via Tropical Discs on K3 Surfaces“

May 8 – Day 3

9:00am
Breakfast

9:45am – 10:45am
Kwokwai Chan, “HMS for local CY manifolds via SYZ“

10:45am – 11:15am
Break

11:15am – 12:15pm
Netanel Blaier, “The quantum Johnson homomorphism, formality and symplectic isotopy“

12:15pm – 1:45pm
Lunch

1:45pm – 2:45pm
Jingyu Zhao, “Periodic symplectic cohomology and the Hodge filtration“

2:45pm – 3:00pm
Break

3:00pm – 4:00pm
Michael Viscardi, “Equivariant quantum cohomology and the geometric Satake equivalence“

* Click titles for talk videos. All videos are also available on “Harvard CMSA” channel on Youtube, grouped into playlist “Simons Collaboration on Homological Mirror symmetry“.

This event is sponsored by the Simons Foundation and CMSA Harvard University.

05-11-2016 General Relativity Seminar
2016-05-11 16:58

05-11-2016 Random Matrix & Probability Theory Seminar
2016-05-11 17:00

05-13-2016 Special Mathematical Physics Seminar
2016-05-13 16:54

05-18-2016 General Relativity Seminar
2016-05-18 17:02

Workshop on Aspects of General Relativity
2016-05-23 08:30 - 2016-05-24 16:00
The Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications will be hosting a workshop on General Relativity from May 23 – 24, 2016. The workshop will be hosted in Room G10 of the CMSA Building located at 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. The workshop will start on Monday, May 23 at 9am and end on Tuesday, May 24 at 4pm.
Speakers:

Po-Ning Chen, Columbia University
Piotr T. Chruściel, University of Vienna
Justin Corvino, Lafayette College
Greg Galloway, University of Miami
James Guillochon, Harvard University
Lan-Hsuan Huang, University of Connecticut
Dan Kapec, Harvard University
Dan Lee, CUNY
Alex Lupsasca, Harvard University
Pengzi Miao, University of Miami
Prahar Mitra, Harvard University
Lorenzo Sironi, Harvard University
Jared Speck, MIT
Mu-Tao Wang, Columbia University

Registration is capped at 70 participants.
Schedule:

May 23 – Day 1

8:30am
Breakfast

8:55am
Opening remarks

9:00am – 9:45am
Greg Galloway, “Some remarks on photon spheres and their uniqueness“

9:45am – 10:30am
Prahar Mitra, “BMS supertranslations and Weinberg’s soft graviton theorem“

10:30am – 11:00am
Break

11:00am – 11:45am
Dan Kapec, “Area, Entanglement Entropy and Supertranslations at Null Infinity“

11:45am – 12:30pm
Piotr T. Chruściel, “The cosmological constant and the energy of gravitational radiation”

12:30pm – 2:00pm
Lunch

2:00pm – 2:45pm
James Guillochon, “Tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes: dynamics, light, and relics”

2:45pm – 3:30pm
Mu-Tao Wang, “Quasi local conserved quantities in general relativity“

3:30pm – 4:00pm
Break

4:00pm – 4:45pm
Po-Ning Chen, “Quasi local energy in presence of gravitational radiations”

4:45pm – 5:30pm
Pengzi Miao, “Total mean curvature, scalar curvature, and a variational analog of Brown York mass“

May 24 – Day 2

8:45am
Breakfast

9:00am – 9:45am
Justin Corvino, “Scalar curvature deformation and the Bartnik mass“

9:45am – 10:30am
Lan-Hsuan Huang, “Constraint Manifolds with the Dominant Energy Condition“

10:30am – 11:00am
Break

11:00am – 11:45am
Dan Lee, “Lower semicontinuity of Huisken’s isoperimetric mass“

11:45am – 12:30pm
Jared Speck, “Shock Formation in Solutions to the Compressible Euler Equations“

12:30pm – 2:00pm
Lunch

2:00pm – 2:45pm
Lorenzo Sironi, “Electron Heating and Acceleration in the Vicinity of Supermassive Black Holes“

2:45pm – 3:30pm
Alex Lupsasca, “Near Horizon Extreme Kerr Magnetospheres“

* Click titles for talk videos. All videos are also available on “Harvard CMSA” channel on Youtube, grouped into playlist “Workshop on Aspects on General Relativity“.
* This event is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF) and CMSA Harvard University.

Organizers: Piotr T. Chruściel and Shing-Tung Yau

05-25-2016 General Relativity Seminar
2016-05-25 16:52

06-01-2016 Random Matrix & Probability Theory Seminar
2016-06-01 17:03

06-08-2016 Random Matrix & Probability Theory Seminar
2016-06-08 17:04

Workshop on Optimization in Image Processing
2016-06-27 09:00 - 2016-06-30 12:30 | CMSA Room G10, CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
The Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications will be hosting a workshop on Optimization in Image Processing on June 27 – 30, 2016. This 4-day workshop aims to bring together researchers to exchange and stimulate ideas in imaging sciences, with a special focus on new approaches based on optimization methods. This is a cutting-edge topic with crucial impact in various areas of imaging science including inverse problems, image processing and computer vision. 16 speakers will participate in this event, which we think will be a very stimulating and exciting workshop. The workshop will be hosted in Room G10 of the CMSA Building located at 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Titles, abstracts and schedule will be provided nearer to the event.
Speakers:

Antonin Chambolle, CMAP, Ecole Polytechnique
Raymond Chan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Ke Chen, University of Liverpool
Patrick Louis Combettes, Université Pierre et Marie Curie
Mario Figueiredo, Instituto Superior Técnico
Alfred Hero, University of Michigan
Ronald Lok Ming Lui, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Mila Nikolova, Ecole Normale Superieure Cachan
Shoham Sabach, Israel Institute of Technology
Martin Benning, University of Cambridge
Jin Keun Seo, Yonsei University
Fiorella Sgallari, University of Bologna
Gabriele Steidl, Kaiserslautern University of Technology
Joachim Weickert, Saarland University
Isao Yamada, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Wotao Yin, UCLA

Please click Workshop Program for a downloadable schedule with talk abstracts.
Please note that lunch will not be provided during the conference, but a map of Harvard Square with a list of local restaurants can be found by clicking Map & Resturants.
Please click here for registration – Registration Deadline: June 7, 2016; Registration is capped at 70 participants.

Schedule:

June 27 – Day 1

9:00am
Breakfast

9:20am
Opening remarks

9:30am – 10:20am
Joachim Weickert, “FSI Schemes: Fast Semi-Iterative Methods for Diffusive or Variational Image Analysis Problems”

10:20am – 10:50am
Break

10:50am – 11:40pm
Patrick Louis Combettes, “Block-Iterative Asynchronous Variational Image Recovery”

11:40am – 12:30pm
Isao Yamada, “Spicing up Convex Optimization for Certain Inverse Problems”

12:30pm – 2:00pm
Lunch

2:30pm – 3:20pm
Fiorella Sgallari, “Majorization-Minimization for Nonconvex Optimization”

3:20pm – 3:50pm
Break

3:50pm – 4:40pm
Shoham Sabach, “A Framework for Globally Convergent Methods in Nonsmooth and Nonconvex Problems”

June 28 – Day 2

9:00am
Breakfast

9:30am – 10:20am
Antonin Chambolle, “Acceleration of alternating minimisations”

10:20am – 10:50am
Break

10:50am – 11:40am
Mario Figueiredo, “ADMM in Image Restoration and Related Problems: Some History and Recent Advances”

11:40am – 12:30pm
Ke Chen, “Image Restoration and Registration Based on Total Fractional-Order Variation Regularization”

12:30pm – 2:30pm
Lunch

2:30pm – 4:40pm
Discussions

June 29 – Day 3

9:00am
Breakfast

9:30am – 10:20am
Alfred Hero, “Continuum relaxations for discrete optimization”

10:20am – 10:50am
Break

10:50am – 11:40am
Wotao Yin, “Coordinate Update Algorithms for Computational Imaging and Machine Learning”

11:40am – 12:30pm
Mila Nikolova, “Limits on noise removal using log-likelihood and regularization”

12:30pm – 2:30pm
Lunch

2:30pm – 3:20pm
Martin Benning, “Nonlinear spectral decompositions and the inverse scale space method”

3:20pm – 3:50pm
Break

3:50pm – 4:40pm
Ronald Ming Lui, “TEMPO: Feature-endowed Teichmuller extremal mappings of point cloud for shape classification”

June 30 – Day 4

9:00am
Breakfast

9:30am – 10:20am
Jin Keun Seo, “Mathematical methods for biomedical impedance imaging”

10:20am – 10:50am
Break

10:50am – 11:40am
Gabriele Steidl, “Iterative Multiplicative Filters for Data Labeling”

11:40am – 12:30pm
Raymond Chan, “Point-spread function reconstruction in ground-based astronomy”

* This event is sponsored by CMSA Harvard University.

Organizers: Raymond Chan and Shing-Tung Yau

07-12-2016 Chinese Economy Seminar
2016-07-12 17:06

07-19-2016 Chinese Economy Seminar
2016-07-19 17:07

08-02-2016 China Gazetteer Seminar
2016-08-02 17:08

2016 Big Data Conference & Workshop
2016-08-22 09:00 - 2016-08-23 16:30 | Harvard Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138
! LOCATION CHANGE: The conference will be in Science Center Hall C on Tuesday, Aug.23, 2016.
The Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications will be hosting a workshop on Big Data from August 12 – 21, 2016 followed by a two-day conference on Big Data from August 22 – 23, 2016.
Big Data Conference features many speakers from the Harvard Community as well as many scholars from across the globe, with talks focusing on computer science, statistics, math and physics, and economics. This is the second conference on Big Data the Center will host as part of our annual events. The 2015 conference was a huge success.
The conference will be hosted at Harvard Science Center Hall A (Monday, Aug.22) & Hall C (Tuesday, Aug.23): 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.
The 2016 Big Data conference is sponsored by the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications at Harvard University and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Conference Speakers:

Jörn Boehnke, Harvard CMSA
Joan Bruna, UC Berkeley [Video]
Tamara Broderick, MIT [Video]
Justin Chen, MIT [Video]
Yiling Chen, Harvard University [Video]
Amir Farbin, UT Arlington [Video]
Doug Finkbeiner, Harvard University [Video]
Andrew Gelman, Columbia University [Video]
Nina Holden, MIT [Video]
Elchanan Mossel, MIT
Alex Peysakhovich, Facebook
Alexander Rakhlin, University of Pennsylvania [Video]
Neal Wadhwa, MIT [Video]
Jun Yin, University of Wisconsin
Harry Zhou, Yale University [Video]

Please click Conference Program for a downloadable schedule with talk abstracts.
Conference Schedule:

August 22 – Day 1

8:30am
Breakfast

8:55am
Opening remarks

9:00am – 9:50am
Yiling Chen, “Machine Learning with Strategic Data Sources” [Video]

9:50am – 10:40am
Andrew Gelman, “Taking Bayesian Inference Seriously” [Video]

10:40am – 11:10am
Break

11:10am – 12:00pm
Harrison Zhou, “A General Framework for Bayes Structured Linear Models” [Video]

12:00pm – 1:30pm
Lunch

1:30pm – 2:20pm
Douglas Finkbeiner, “Mapping the Milky Way in 3D with star colors” [Video]

2:20pm – 3:10pm
Nina Holden, “Sparse exchangeable graphs and their limits” [Video]

3:10pm – 3:40pm
Break

3:40pm – 4:30pm
Alex Peysakhovich, “How social science methods inform personalization on Facebook News Feed” [Video]

4:30pm – 5:20pm
Amir Farbin, “Deep Learning in High Energy Physics” [Video]

August 23 – Day 2

8:45am
Breakfast

9:00am – 9:50am
Joan Bruna Estrach, “Addressing Computational and Statistical Gaps with Deep Networks” [Video]

9:50am – 10:40am
Justin Chen & Neal Wadhwa, “Smaller Than the Eye Can See: Big Engineering from Tiny Motions in Video” [Video]

10:40am – 11:10am
Break

11:10am – 12:00pm
Alexander Rakhlin, “How to Predict When Estimation is Hard: Algorithms for Learning on Graphs” [Video]

12:00pm – 1:30pm
Lunch

1:30pm – 2:20pm
Tamara Broderick, “Fast Quantification of Uncertainty and Robustness with Variational Bayes” [Video]

2:20pm – 3:10pm
Elchanan Mossel, “Phylogenetic Reconstruction – a Rigorous Model of Deep Learning”

3:10pm – 3:40pm
Break

3:40pm – 4:30pm
Jörn Boehnke, “Amazon’s Price and Sales-rank Data: What can one billion prices on 150 thousand products tell us about the economy?”

Workshop Participants:
Richard Freeman’s Group:

Sen Chai, ESSEC
Brock Mendel, Harvard University
Raviv Muriciano-Goroff, Stanford University
Sifan Zhou, CMSA

Scott Kominer’s Group:

Bradly Stadie, UC Berkeley
Neal Wadhwa, MIT [Video]
Justin Chen

Christopher Rogan’s Group:

Amir Farbin, UT Arlington [Video]
Paul Jackson, University of Adelaide

For more information about the workshops, please reach out directly to the individual group leaders.
* This event is sponsored by CMSA Harvard University and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

09-12-2016 Mathematical Physics Seminar
2016-09-12 17:10

Homological Mirror Symmetry Seminar
2016-09-15 14:00 - 16:00
The seminar series, Homological Mirror Symmetry, will be held on selected Thursdays from 2PM – 4pm in CMSA Building, 20 Garden Street, Room G10.
The list of speakers is below and will be updated as details are confirmed.

Date
Name
Title

09-15-16

09-22-16
Netanel Blaier, Brandeis
“Intro to HMS.”
Abstract: This is the first talk of the seminar series. We survey the statement of Homological Mirror Symmetry (introduced by Kontsevich in 1994) and some known results, as well as briefly discussing its importance, and the connection to other formulations of Mirror Symmetry and the SYZ conjecture. Following that, we will begin to review the definition of the A-side (namely, the Fukaya category) in some depth. No background is assumed! Also, in the last half hour, we will divide papers and topics among participants.
Lecture Slides

09-29-16
Netanel Blaier, Brandeis
“Intro to HMS 2.”
Abstract: In the second talk, we review (some) of the nitty-gritty details needed to construct a Fukaya categories. This include basic Floer theory, the analytic properties of J-holomorphic curves and cylinders, Gromov compactness and its relation to metric topology on the compactified moduli space, and Banach setup and perturbation schemes commonly used in geometric regularization. We then proceed to recall the notion of an operad, Fukaya’s differentiable correspondences, and how to perform the previous constructions coherently in order to obtain $A_infty$-structures. We will try to demonstrate all concepts in the Morse theory ‘toy model’.
Lecture Slides

10-06-16

Hansol Hong, CMSA

Title: Homological mirror symmetry for elliptic curves
Abstract:
We survey the proof of homological mirror symmetry by Polishchuk and Zaslow. Some of more recent methods to prove HMS for elliptic curves will be discussed also,
which use homological algebra techniques and formal deformation theory of Lagrangians etc.
Notes
Notes (Baris)

10-13-16

Yu-Wei Fan, Harvard

Title: Semi-flat mirror symmetry and Fourier-Mukai transform
Abstract: We will review the semi-flat mirror symmetry setting in Strominger-Yau-Zaslow, and discuss the correspondence between special Lagrangian sections on the A-side and deformed Hermitian-Yang-Mills connections on the B-side using real Fourier-Mukai transform, following Leung-Yau-Zaslow.

10-20-16

Tim Large, MIT

Title: “Symplectic cohomology and wrapped Fukaya categories”
Abstract: While mirror symmetry was originally conjectured for compact manifolds, the phenomenon applies to non-compact manifolds as well. In the setting of Liouville domains, a class of open symplectic manifolds including affine varieties, cotangent bundles and Stein manifolds, there is an A-infinity category called the wrapped Fukaya category, which is easier to define and often more amenable to computation than the original Fukaya category. In this talk I will construct it, along with symplectic cohomology (its closed-string counterpart), and compute some examples. We will then discuss how compactifying a symplectic manifold corresponds, on the B-side of mirror symmetry, to turning on a Landau-Ginzburg potential.
Notes

10-27-16

Philip Engel, Columbia

Title: Mirror symmetry in the complement of an anticanonical divisor”
According to the SYZ conjecture, the mirror of a Calabi-Yau variety can be constructed by dualizing the fibers of a special Lagrangian fibration. Following Auroux, we consider this rubric for an open Calabi-Yau variety X-D given as the complement of a normal crossings anticanonical divisor D in X. In this talk, we first define the moduli space of special Lagrangian submanfiolds L with a flat U(1) connection in X-D, and note that it locally has the structure of a Calabi-Yau variety. The Fukaya category of such Lagrangians is obstructed, and the degree 0 part of the obstruction on L defines a holomorphic function on the mirror. This “superpotential” depends on counts of holomorphic discs of Maslov index 2 bounded by L. We then restrict to the surface case, where there are codimension 1 “walls” consisting of Lagrangians which bound a disc of Maslov index 0. We examine how the superpotential changes when crossing a wall and discuss how one ought to “quantum correct” the complex structure on the moduli space to undo the discontinuity introduced by these discs.
Notes

11-03-16

Yusuf Baris Kartal, MIT

HMS for Del Pezzo surfaces
I will present Auroux-Katzarkov-Orlov’s proof of one side of the homological mirror symmetry for Del Pezzo surfaces. Namely I will prove their derived categories are equivalent to the categories of vanishing cycles for certain LG-models together with B-fields. I plan to show how the general B-field corresponds to non-commutative Del Pezzo surfaces and time allowing may mention HMS for simple degenerations of Del Pezzo surfaces. The tools include exceptional collections( and mutations for degenerate case), explicit description of NC deformations, etc.

11-10-16
No seminar this week

12-08-16

Lino Amorim, Boston University

Title: The Fukaya category of a compact toric manifold
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss the Fukaya category of a toric manifold following the work of Fukaya-Oh-Ohta-Ono. I will start with an overview of the general structure of the Fukaya category of a compact symplectic manifold. Then I will consider toric manifolds in particular the Fano case and construct its mirror.
Video

09-19-2016 Mathematical Physics Seminar
2016-09-19 17:11

09-21-2016 Random Matrix & Probability Theory Seminar
2016-09-21 17:13

09-22-2016 Homological Mirror Symmetry Seminar
2016-09-22 14:00 - 16:00
References:

D. Auroux, A beginner’s introduction to Fukaya categories. arXiv:1301.7056
I. Smith, A symplectic prolegomenon. arXiv:1401.0269
D. Auroux, “Topics in geometry: mirror symmetry”, Fall 2009 (MIT Math 18.969)
Nick Sheridan’s IAS and Jussieu lectures.
Sheel Gantara “Topics in symplectic topology”, Spring 2016 (Stanford Math 257B)

09-26-16 Mathematical Physics Seminar
2016-09-26 17:32
