Member Seminar Speaker: Dan Kapec Title: Black Holes, 2D Gravity, and Random Matrices Abstract: I will discuss old and new connections between black hole physics, 2D quantum gravity, and random matrix theory. Black holes are believed to be very complicated, strongly interacting quantum mechanical systems, and certain aspects of their Hamiltonians should be well approximated by random […]
Abstract: Extremal black holes play a key role in our understanding of various swampland conjectures and in particular the WGC. The mild form of the WGC states that higher-derivative corrections should decrease the mass of extremal black holes at fixed charge. Whether or not this conjecture is satisfied depends on the sign of the combination […]
Abstract: Let M_n be drawn uniformly from all n by n symmetric matrices with entries in {-1,1}. In this talk I’ll consider the following basic question: what is the probability that M_n is singular? I’ll discuss recent joint work with Marcelo Campos, Marcus Michelen and Julian Sahasrabudhe where we show that this probability is exponentially small. […]
Speaker: Maria Chudnovsky, Princeton Title: Induced subgraphs and tree decompositions Abstract: Tree decompositions are a powerful tool in both structural graph theory and graph algorithms. Many hard problems become tractable if the input graph is known to have a tree decomposition of bounded “width”. Exhibiting a particular kind of a tree decomposition is also a useful way […]
Speaker: Fei Yan (Rutgers) Title: Defects, link invariants and exact WKB Abstract: I will describe some of my recent work on defects in supersymmetric field theories. The first part of my talk is focused on line defects in certain large classes of 4d N=2 theories and 3d N=2 theories. I will describe geometric methods to compute the […]
https://youtu.be/soqWNyrdjkw Speaker: Piotr Nawrot, University of Warsaw Title: Hierarchical Transformers are More Efficient Language Models Abstract: Transformer models yield impressive results on many NLP and sequence modeling tasks. Remarkably, Transformers can handle long sequences which allows them to produce long coherent outputs: full paragraphs produced by GPT-3 or well-structured images produced by DALL-E. These large language […]
Karen Uhlenbeck (Institute for Advanced Study) Title: The Noether Theorems in Geometry: Then and Now Abstract: The 1918 Noether theorems were a product of the general search for energy and momentum conservation in Einstein’s newly formulated theory of general relativity. Although widely referred to as the connection between symmetry and conservation laws, the theorems themselves […]
Title: Numerical Higher Dimensional Geometry Abstract: In 1977, Yau proved that a Kahler manifold with zero first Chern class admits a Ricci flat metric, which is uniquely determined by certain “moduli” data. These metrics have been very important in mathematics and in theoretical physics, but despite much subsequent work we have no analytical expressions for them. But […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Changji Xu Title: On the solution space of the Ising perceptron model Abstract: Consider the discrete cube $\{-1,1\}^N$ and a random collection of half spaces which includes each half space $H(x) := \{y \in \{-1,1\}^N: x \cdot y \geq \kappa \sqrt{N}\}$ for $x \in \{-1,1\}^N$ independently with probability $p$. The solution space is […]
Speaker: Lukasz Fidkowski (U Washington) Title: Gravitational anomaly of 3 + 1 dimensional Z2 toric code with fermionic charges and ferionic loop self-statistics Abstract: Quasiparticle excitations in 3 + 1 dimensions can be either bosons or fermions. In this work, we introduce the notion of fermionic loop excitations in 3 + 1 dimensional topological phases. Specifically, we […]
Abstract: A long-standing problem in random graph theory has been to determine asymptotically the length of a longest induced path in sparse random graphs. Independent work of Luczak and Suen from the 90s showed the existence of an induced path of roughly half the optimal size, which seems to be a barrier for certain natural approaches. […]