CMSA

Speaker: Greg Galloway (University of Miami) Title: On the geometry and topology of initial data sets in General Relativity Abstract: A theme of long standing interest (to the speaker!) concerns the relationship between the topology of spacetime and the occurrence of singularities (causal geodesic incompleteness). Many results concerning this center around the notion of topological censorship, which […]

Speaker: Philippe Sosoe (Cornell) Title: A sharp transition for Gibbs measures associated to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation Abstract: In 1987, Lebowitz, Rose and Speer (LRS) showed how to construct formally invariant measures for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation on the torus. This seminal contribution spurred a large amount of activity in the area of partial differential equations […]

Speaker: Ian Martin (LSE) Title: Sentiment and Speculation in a Market with Heterogeneous Beliefs Abstract: We present a dynamic model featuring risk-averse investors with heterogeneous beliefs. Individual investors have stable beliefs and risk aversion, but agents who were correct in hindsight become relatively wealthy; their beliefs are overrepresented in market sentiment, so “the market” is bullish following good news and […]

Speaker: Michael Woodford (Columbia) Title: Optimally Imprecise Memory and Biased Forecasts Abstract: We propose a model of optimal decision making subject to a memory constraint. The constraint is a limit on the complexity of memory measured using Shannon’s mutual information, as in models of rational inattention; the structure of the imprecise memory is optimized (for a given decision problem and […]

Speaker: Ulrich Mueller (Princeton) Title: Inference for the Mean Abstract: Consider inference about the mean of a population with finite variance, based on an i.i.d. sample. The usual t-statistic yields correct inference in large samples, but heavy tails induce poor small sample behavior. This paper combines extreme value theory for the smallest and largest observations with a normal approximation for […]

Speaker: Richard B. Freeman (Harvard University and NBER) Title: Innovation in Cell Phones in the US and China: Who Improves Technology Faster? Abstract: Cell phones are the archetypical modern consumer innovation, spreading around the world at an incredible pace, extensively used for connecting people with the Internet and diverse apps. Consumers report spending from 2-5 hours a day […]

Speaker: Robert McCann (University of Toronto) Title: Displacement convexity of Boltzmann's entropy characterizes positive energy in general relativity Abstract: Einstein's theory of gravity is based on assuming that the fluxes of a energy and momentum in a physical system are proportional to a certain variant of the Ricci curvature tensor on a smooth 3+1 dimensional spacetime. The fact that […]

Speaker: Robert Haslhofer (University of Toronto) Title: Recent progress on mean curvature flow Abstract: A family of surfaces moves by mean curvature flow if the velocity at each point is given by the mean curvature vector. Mean curvature flow is the most natural evolution in extrinsic geometry and shares many features with Hamilton’s Ricci flow from intrinsic geometry. In the […]