Colloquium Speaker: Clark Barwick, University of Edinburgh Title: Factorization algebras in quite a lot of generality Abstract: The objects of arithmetic geometry are not manifolds. Some concepts from differential geometry admit analogues in arithmetic, but they are not straightforward. How then can we hope to make precise sense of quantum field theories on these objects? […]
Colloquium Speaker: Raghu Meka (UCLA) Title: Strong bounds for arithmetic progressions Abstract: Suppose you have a set S of integers from {1,2,...,N} that contains at least N / C elements. Then for large enough N, must S contain three equally spaced numbers (i.e., a 3-term arithmetic progression)? In 1953, Roth showed this is the case […]
Colloquium Speaker: Natalie Paquette, University of Washington Title: Koszul duality & twisted holography for asymptotically flat spacetimes Abstract: Koszul duality has been understood in recent years to characterize order-type defects in twists of supersymmetric field theories. This notion has been generalized, from a physical point of view, by studying couplings between D-branes and closed string […]
Colloquium Speaker: Lance Dixon (SLAC, Stanford University) Title: The DNA of Particle Scattering Abstract: At the Large Hadron Collider, the copious scattering of quarks and gluons in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) produces Higgs bosons and many backgrounds to searches for new physics. At short distances, scattering in QCD can be evaluated in perturbation theory and leads to highly […]
Colloquium Speaker: Sarah Harrison (Northeastern University) Title: Liouville Theory and Weil-Petersson Geometry Abstract: Two-dimensional conformal field theory is a powerful tool to understand the geometry of surfaces. Liouville conformal field theory in the classical (large central charge) limit encodes the geometry of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces. I describe an efficient algorithm to compute […]
Colloquium Speaker: Madhu Sudan, Harvard University Title: Errors and Correction in Cumulative Knowledge Abstract: Societal accumulation of knowledge is a complex, and arguably error-prone, process. The correctness of new units of knowledge depends not only on the correctness of the new reasoning, but also on the correctness of old units that the new one builds […]
Colloquium Speaker: Lauren Williams, Harvard University Title: Combinatorics and geometry of the amplituhedron Abstract: The amplituhedron is a geometric object introduced by Arkani-Hamed and Trnka to compute scattering amplitudes in N=4 super Yang Mills theory. It generalizes interesting objects such as cyclic polytopes and the positive Grassmannian. It has connections to tropical geometry, cluster algebras, […]
Colloquium Speaker: Pavel Etingof (MIT) Title: Periodic pencils of flat connections and their p-curvature A periodic pencil of flat connections on a smooth algebraic variety is a linear family of flat connections , where are local coordinates on and are matrix-valued regular functions. A pencil is periodic if it is generically invariant under the shifts up to isomorphism. I will […]
Colloquium Speaker: Lisa Carbone, Rutgers University Title: Symmetry groups in infinite dimensions Abstract: The study of many physical theories requires an understanding of symmetries of infinite dimensional Lie algebras. The construction of groups of automorphisms for infinite dimensional Lie algebras is challenging, but there is well established theory for the class of Kac-Moody algebras. A […]
Colloquium Speaker: Elisenda Grigsby, Boston College Title: Local complexity measures in modern parameterized function classes for supervised learning Abstract: The parameter space for any fixed architecture of neural networks serves as a proxy during training for the associated class of functions - but how faithful is this representation? For any fixed feedforward ReLU network architecture, it […]
Colloquium Speaker: Artem Chernikov, University of Maryland Title: Higher Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory Abstract: Finite VC-dimension, a combinatorial property of families of sets, was discovered simultaneously by Vapnik and Chervonenkis in probabilistic learning theory, and by Shelah in model theory (where it is called NIP). It plays an important role in several areas including machine learning, combinatorics, mathematical […]
Colloquium Speaker: Martin Nowak (Harvard) Title: The mathematics of evolution Abstract: All living systems are guided by evolutionary dynamics. Evolution is a search process which occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The three fundamental forces of evolution are mutation, selection and cooperation. I will present basic ideas in the mathematical description of evolutionary dynamics, including quasi-species theory, evolutionary […]