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Contractility, structure formation and fluctuations in active gels, with and without molecular motors

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

Active Matter Seminar Speaker: Fred MacKintosh (Rice University) Title: Contractility, structure formation and fluctuations in active gels, with and without molecular motors Abstract: Various processes in living cells depend on contractile forces that are often generated by myosin motors in concert with polar actin filaments. A textbook example of this is the actomyosin contractile ring that […]

On the Breakdown of Einstein’s Gravity

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

Member Seminar Speaker: Puskar Mondal (CMSA) Title: On the Breakdown of Einstein's Gravity Abstract: It is important to understand under which conditions, the solutions of non-linear hyperbolic PDEs break down in finite time. In the context of Einstein's gravity, this is very closely tied to naked singularity formation and Penrose's weak cosmic censorship conjecture. In this talk, […]

Moduli of boundary polarized Calabi-Yau pairs

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

Algebraic Geometry in String Theory Seminar Pre-talk Speaker: Rosie Shen (Harvard): 10:00-10:30 am Pre-talk Title: Introduction to the singularities of the MMP Speaker: Dori Bejleri (Harvard Math & CMSA) Title: Moduli of boundary polarized Calabi-Yau pairs Abstract: The theories of KSBA stability and K-stability furnish compact moduli spaces of general type pairs and Fano pairs […]

Breaking ergodicity: quantum scars and regular eigenstates

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

https://youtu.be/AKZ4O0ZUrPo Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Ceren Dag, Harvard Title: Breaking ergodicity: quantum scars and regular eigenstates Abstract: Quantum many-body scars (QMBS) consist of a few low-entropy eigenstates in an otherwise chaotic many-body spectrum and can weakly break ergodicity resulting in robust oscillatory dynamics. The notion of QMBS follows the original single-particle scars introduced within the context of […]

An exploration of infinite games—infinite Wordle and the Mastermind numbers

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

Speaker: Joel D. Hamkins (Notre Dame and Oxford) Title: An exploration of infinite games—infinite Wordle and the Mastermind numbers Abstract: Let us explore the nature of strategic reasoning in infinite games, focusing on the cases of infinite Wordle and infinite Mastermind. The familiar game of Wordle extends naturally to longer words or even infinite words in an […]

Composite fermions and the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect

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

https://youtu.be/UqrKDW6aJuc Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Hart Goldman, University of Chicago Title: Composite fermions and the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect Abstract: Recent experiments have revealed evidence for fractional quantum anomalous Hall (FQAH) states at zero magnetic field in a growing number of moire materials. In this talk, I will argue that a composite fermion […]

Physics of Language Models: Knowledge Storage, Extraction, and Manipulation

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

https://youtu.be/M25cbX5do8Y New Technologies in Mathematics Seminar Speaker: Yuanzhi Li, CMU Dept. of Machine Learning and Microsoft Research Title: Physics of Language Models: Knowledge Storage, Extraction, and Manipulation Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can memorize a massive amount of knowledge during pre-training, but can they effectively use this knowledge at inference time? In this work, we show several striking […]

Geometry of the doubly periodic Aztec dimer model

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

Probability Seminar Speaker: Tomas Berggren (MIT) Title: Geometry of the doubly periodic Aztec dimer model Abstract: Random dimer models (or equivalently tiling models) have been a subject of extensive research in mathematics and physics for several decades. In this talk, we will discuss the doubly periodic Aztec diamond dimer model of growing size, with arbitrary […]

CMSA Director Dan Freed featured in Harvard Gazette

CMSA Director Dan Freed featured in Harvard Gazette "Center welcomes new director, a Harvard alum who will explore ‘beautiful, deep’ interactions between mathematics, science." Link to article. Story by Anne J. Manning, Harvard Staff Writer Photo courtesy of Niles Singer, Harvard University.

Black Holes as Quantum Systems

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

Member Seminar Speaker: Daniel Kapec (CMSA) Title: Black Holes as Quantum Systems Abstract: To an outside observer, a black hole appears to be an ordinary quantum mechanical system with finite entropy and highly chaotic internal dynamics. Nevertheless, the low-temperature thermodynamics of the Kerr black hole presents several puzzles. For instance, the leading order semiclassical approximation to the […]

Gauged Linear Sigma Models and Cohomological Field Theories

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

Algebraic Geometry in String Theory Seminar Speaker: David Favero, University of Minnesota Title: Gauged Linear Sigma Models and Cohomological Field Theories Abstract: This talk is dedicated to the memory of my friend and collaborator Bumsig Kim and based on joint work with Ciocan-Fontanine-Guere-Kim-Shoemaker.  Gauged Linear Sigma Models (GLSMs)  serve as a means of interpolating between […]

 On Provable Copyright Protection for Generative Model

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

Speaker: Boaz Barak (Harvard) Title: On Provable Copyright Protection for Generative Model Abstract: There is a growing concern that learned conditional generative models may output samples that are substantially similar to some copyrighted data C that was in their training set. We give a formal definition of near access-freeness (NAF) and prove bounds on the probability that a […]