Speaker: David Jordan (U Edinburgh) Title: Langlands duality for 3 manifolds Abstract: Langlands duality began as a deep and still mysterious conjecture in number theory, before branching into a similarly deep and mysterious conjecture of Beilinson and Drinfeld concerning the algebraic geometry of Riemann surfaces. In this guise it was given a physical explanation in the framework of 4-dimensional super […]
Abstract: Life is a nonequilibrium phenomenon. Metabolism provides a continuous flux of energy that dictates the form and function of many subcellular structures. These subcellular structures are active materials, composed of molecules which use chemical energy to perform mechanical work and locally violate detailed balance. One of the most dramatic examples of such a self-organizing […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Jue Liu Title: Instability of naked singularities in general relativity Abstract: One of the fundamental problems in mathematical relativity is the weak cosmic censorship conjecture, proposed by Penrose, which roughly states that for generic physical spacetime, the singularities (if existed) must be hidden behind the black holes. Unfortunately, the singularities visible to faraway observers, […]
Abstract: The study of static vacuum Riemannian metrics arises naturally in differential geometry and general relativity. It plays an important role in scalar curvature deformation, as well as in constructing Einstein spacetimes. Existence of static vacuum Riemannian metrics with prescribed Bartnik data is one of the most fundamental problems in Riemannian geometry related to general relativity. […]
On October 4th and October 5th, 2021, Harvard CMSA will host its annual Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott. This year’s speaker will be Michael Freedman (Microsoft). The lectures will take place from 11:00am – 12:15pm (ET) on Zoom. This will be the third annual lecture series held in honor of Raoul Bott. Lecture 1 October 4th, 11:00am (Boston time) Title: […]
On October 4th and October 5th, 2021, Harvard CMSA hosted the annual Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott. This year’s speaker was Michael Freedman (Microsoft). The lectures took place on Zoom. This will be the third annual lecture series held in honor of Raoul Bott. Lecture 1 October 4th, 11:00am (Boston time) Title: The Universe from a […]
Abstract: The definition of angular momentum in general relativity has been a subtle issue since the 1960′, due to the discovery of “supertranslation ambiguity”: the angular momentums recorded by two distant observers of the same system may not be the same. In this talk, I shall show how the mathematical theory of optimal isometric embedding and […]
Title: Geodesic Geometry on Graphs Abstract: In a graph G = (V, E) we consider a system of paths S so that for every two vertices u,v in V there is a unique uv path in S connecting them. The path system is said to be consistent if it is closed under taking subpaths, i.e. if P is a path in […]
Speaker: Piotr Sułkowski (University of Warsaw) Title: Strings, knots and quivers Abstract: I will discuss a recently discovered relation between quivers and knots, as well as – more generally – toric Calabi-Yau manifolds. In the context of knots this relation is referred to as the knots-quivers correspondence, and it states that various invariants of a given knot […]
Title: Line defects in CFTs: Renormalization group flows and semiclassical limits Abstract: I will discuss line defects in d-dimensional Conformal Field Theories (CFTs). In the first part of the talk, I will argue that the ambient CFT places nontrivial constraints on Renormalization Group (RG) flows on such line defects. I will show that the flow […]
https://youtu.be/zJOWdZZcitk Speaker: Thomas Fischbacher, Google Title: New results in Supergravity via ML Technology Abstract: The infrastructure built to power the Machine Learning revolution has many other uses beyond Deep Learning. Starting from a general architecture-level overview over the lower levels of Google’s TensorFlow machine learning library, we review how this has recently helped us to […]
Title: A tour of categorical symmetry Abstract: I will discuss some perspectives on symmetry coming from the study of topological defects in quantum field theory. I will argue that we should take topological defects themselves to define the symmetries of QFT. This gives us a view of the “category of QFTs”. I will describe some […]