Today

  • Moduli spaces of 4d N=2 quantum field theories

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

    Differential Geometry and Physics Seminar Speaker: Robert Moscrop, CMSA Title: Moduli spaces of 4d N=2 quantum field theories Abstract: Supersymmetry endows quantum field theories with several rich algebraic and geometric structures associated to their moduli space of vacua, providing powerful tools to study such theories non-perturbatively. For example, in four-dimensional theories with eight supercharges, the […]

  • Topological Manifolds – The First 100 Years

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

    Colloquium Speaker: Michael Freedman (Harvard CMSA and Logical Intelligence) Title: Topological Manifolds – The First 100 Years Abstract: I’ll review manifold topology in the topological category from its start with work of Rado (1925) and Kneser (1926) to the present. Work of Moise, Mazur, Kirby, Siebenmann, Sullivan, Kruskal, and the speaker will be discussed. In my view […]

  • Orientifolds for F-theory on K3 Surfaces

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

    Quantum Field Theory and Physical Mathematics Seminar Speaker: Chuck Doran (Alberta/CMSA) Title: Orientifolds for F-theory on K3 Surfaces Abstract: Compactification of F-theory on an elliptically fibered K3 surface provides a framework to encode type IIB string theory on elliptic curves, with the Kaehler modulus of the elliptic curve encoded in the complex structure of the elliptic fibers. In […]

  • Big Data Conference 2025

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

    Big Data Conference 2025 Dates: Sep. 11–12, 2025 Location: Harvard University CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge & via Zoom The Big Data Conference features speakers from the Harvard community as well as scholars from across the globe, with talks focusing on computer science, statistics, math and physics, and economics. Invited Speakers Markus J. Buehler, MIT […]

  • Echo Chamber: RL Post-training Amplifies Behaviors Learned in Pretraining

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

    Member Seminar Speaker: Samy Jelassi, CMSA Title: Echo Chamber: RL Post-training Amplifies Behaviors Learned in Pretraining Abstract: Reinforcement Learning has become a crucial step in training state-of-the-art language models such as DeepSeek-R1 for solving mathematical problems. In this talk, I will first review the mechanisms of Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning. Then, I will present a systematic end-to-end […]

  • Mathematical Physics and Algebraic Geometry Seminar

    Resurgence, number theory, and quantum mirror curves 

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

    Mathematical Physics and Algebraic Geometry Seminar Speaker: Claudia Rella (IHES) Title: Resurgence, number theory, and quantum mirror curves Abstract: Resurgence provides a powerful toolbox to access the non-perturbative sectors hidden within the divergent asymptotic series of quantum theories. Under some special assumptions, the non-perturbative data extracted via resurgent methods possess intrinsic number-theoretic properties that are deeply […]

  • 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 […]

  • Asset pricing with heterogeneous agents

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

    Member Seminar Speaker: Sergiy Verstyuk, Harvard CMSA Title: Asset pricing with heterogeneous agents Abstract: This talk will introduce the basics of continuous-time finance, discuss important existing theories and models, as well as present some new asset pricing results in a setting with many heterogeneous investors. (Joint work with Puskar Mondal.)  

  • 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 […]

  • Incentives for data sharing in federated learning

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

    Member Seminar Speaker: Han Shao, Harvard CMSA Title: Incentives for data sharing in federated learning Abstract: Federated learning has recently emerged as a powerful approach for enabling collaboration across large populations of learning agents. However, agents may have incentives to defect from the collaboration—that is, to withdraw or contribute less data than expected—due to the […]