Today

  • Mathematical Structures of Scattering Amplitudes

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Anastasia Volovich, Brown University Title: Mathematical Structures of Scattering Amplitudes Abstract: Planar N=4 Yang-Mills scattering amplitudes have been computed to very high loop order. They have many remarkable properties that have sparked interest from mathematicians working on combinatorics, algebraic geometry, and number theory. At the same time, several methods that have been developed […]

  • Computability on $\mathbb R$ and other continuum-size structures

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Russell Miller, CUNY Title: Computability on $\mathbb R$ and other continuum-size structures Abstract: We begin by recalling the notion of a computable function on the real numbers $\mathbb R$, developed independently by Gregorczyk and Lacombe over sixty years ago. Using this notion, we note that the real numbers that are themselves computable form […]

  • Featured

    Rational approximation and the AAA algorithm

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Nick Trefethen, Harvard University Title: Rational approximation and the AAA algorithm Approximation by rational functions used to be mainly a theoretical subject, but with the introduction of the AAA algorithm in 2018, it became computationally practical and indeed easy. The implications for what we can do numerically are enormous. This talk will outline […]

  • Featured

    AI in math and theoretical physics: Status and prospects

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Michael Douglas, Harvard CMSA Title: AI in math and theoretical physics: status and prospects Abstract: AI is making great progress and has the potential to change how we work in unprecedented ways. In this talk I will survey a few recent works which illustrate the state of the art, some from my own research, […]

  • Featured

    Large value estimates in number theory and computer science

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Larry Guth, MIT Title: Large value estimates in number theory and computer science Abstract: A large value estimate for a matrix M is a simple type of estimate in quantitative linear algebra. Estimates of this type appear in many parts of math, both pure and applied. One example is the large value problem for […]

  • The Toda Lattice as a Soliton Gas

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Amol Aggarwal, Columbia University Title: The Toda Lattice as a Soliton Gas Abstract: A basic tenet of integrable systems is that, under sufficiently irregular initial data, they can be thought of as dense collections of many solitons, or “soliton gases.” In this talk we focus on the Toda lattice, which is an archetypal example of […]

  • 3-d Mirror Symmetry

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Ben Webster, University of Waterloo & Perimeter Institute Title: 3-d Mirror Symmetry Abstract: I'll give an introduction (or update, for those who've been introduced) to 3d mirror symmetry from the perspective of a mathematician.  

  • Quantum K-theory at roots of unity

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Andrey Smirnov, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Title: Quantum K-theory at roots of unity Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss a version of quantum K-theory introduced by A.Okounkov, which can be defined through quasimap counts. In this framework, the quantum K-theory ring is obtained as a specialization of the equivariant […]

  • Modeling the emergence of complex cortical structure from simple precursors in the brain: maps, hierarchies, and modules

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Ila Fiete, MIT Title: Modeling the emergence of complex cortical structure from simple precursors in the brain: maps, hierarchies, and modules Abstract: Modular and hierarchical structures are ubiquitous in the brain. Two distinct hypotheses for such morphogenesis involve genetic specification (the positional information hypothesis) or spontaneous structure emergence from symmetry breaking (the pattern […]

  • Bass-Note Spectra of locally uniform geometries

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Peter Sarnak, IAS & Princeton University Title: Bass-Note Spectra of locally uniform geometries Abstract: We formulate and report on the problem of the Bass-Note Spectrum of an invariant operator as one varies over locally uniform geometries. In the Euclidean setting this recasts classical problems of Mahler from the geometry of numbers in a new […]

  • Thinking Outside the Ballot Box

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Ariel Procaccia, Harvard University Title: Thinking Outside the Ballot Box Abstract: How should one design unprecedented democratic processes capable of handling enormous sets of alternatives like all possible policies, bills, or statements? I argue that this challenge can be addressed through a framework called generative social choice, which fuses the rigor of social choice theory […]

  • Factorizations for data analysis

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Anna Seigal, Harvard University Title: Factorizations for data analysis Abstract: We can find structure in data by factoring it into building blocks, which should be interpretable for the context at hand. A classical example is principal component analysis (PCA), which uses the eigendecomposition of the covariance matrix to find axes of variation in a dataset. Starting from […]