BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//CMSA - ECPv6.15.18//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu X-WR-CALDESC:Events for CMSA REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20180311T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20181104T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20190310T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20191103T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20200308T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20201101T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20210314T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20211107T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20220313T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20221106T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20230312T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20231105T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20240310T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20241103T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20250309T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20251102T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20260308T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20261101T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20270314T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20271107T060000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20230312T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20231105T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20240310T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20241103T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20250309T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20251102T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20260308T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20261101T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20270314T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20271107T060000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260415T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260415T180000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20250409T160808Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260423T155210Z UID:10003725-1776272400-1776276000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Millennium Prize Problems Lecture - Peter Sarnak: Riemann Hypothesis DESCRIPTION:  \n \nDate: April 15\, 2026 \nTime: 5:00–6:00 pm \nLocation: Harvard Science Center Hall C\, 1 Oxford St.\, Cambridge MA \nSpeaker: Peter Sarnak\, Institute for Advanced Study \nTitle: The Riemann Hypothesis \nAbstract: After reviewing the hypothesis as put forth by Riemann we discuss its generalizations and analogues. We highlight a few of their implications and workarounds\, and probing their truths. \nRead more about the Riemann Hypothesis at the Clay Math website. \nOrganizers: Martin Bridson\, Clay Mathematics Institute | Dan Freed\, Harvard University and CMSA | Mike Hopkins\, Harvard University \n  \n\n                   \n\nMillennium Prize Problems Lecture Series URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/clay_41526/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Millennium Prize Problems Lecture,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Sarnak_web-ad.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260311T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260311T180000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20250409T160708Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260316T161233Z UID:10003724-1773248400-1773252000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Millennium Prize Problems Lecture - Javier Gómez-Serrano: Navier-Stokes Existence or Breakdown DESCRIPTION:Date: March 11\, 2026 \nTime: 5:00–6:00 pm \nLocation: Harvard Science Center Hall C\, 1 Oxford St.\, Cambridge MA & via Zoom Webinar \nSpeaker: Javier Gómez-Serrano\, Brown University \nTitle: Navier-Stokes Existence or Breakdown \nAbstract: The Navier-Stokes equations have been the cornerstone of fluid dynamics for over a century\, accurately describing the motion of viscous fluids such as water and air. However\, despite their fundamental importance to mathematics and physics\, a profound question remains unanswered: do solutions to these equations always exist for all time\, or can they break down and develop singularities (points where the equations lose their validity)? In this Millennium Prize Problems Lecture\, I will explore the current mathematical landscape surrounding the Navier-Stokes and related equations. The talk will discuss the historical context\, the ongoing search for global regularity versus finite-time blowup\, and the latest analytical and computational breakthroughs pushing the boundaries of what we know about fluid behavior. \nRead more about the Navier-Stokes Equation at the Clay Math website. \n  \nOrganizers: Martin Bridson\, Clay Mathematics Institute | Dan Freed\, Harvard University and CMSA | Mike Hopkins\, Harvard University \n\n                   \n\nMillennium Prize Problems Lecture Series URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/clay_31126/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Millennium Prize Problems Lecture,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Gomez-Serrano_web-ad3_crop.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260305T133000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260305T143000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20260220T155737Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260303T174902Z UID:10003909-1772717400-1772721000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Fukaya categories and higher representation theory DESCRIPTION:Differential Geometry and Physics Seminar \nSpeaker: Vivek Shende (Syddansk Universitet & UC Berkeley) \nTitle: Fukaya categories and higher representation theory \nAbstract: I will explain how Lagrangian Floer homology in certain monopole moduli spaces recovers the Khovanov homology and its relatives\, by a description strikingly similar to the Oszvath-Szabo Heegard-Floer theory.  I will also explain how the ‘sectorial descent’ of Fukaya categories can be used to construct Rouquier’s promised monoidal structure on the category of representations of the categorified “positive part” of the quantum group.  This is joint work with Mina Aganagic\, Elise LePage\, and Peng Zhou. \nNote: Location change to Harvard Science Center Room 300H \n  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/dgphys_3526/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Differential Geometry and Physics Seminar ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/DG-Physics-Seminar-3.5.26.docx-scaled.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260304T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260304T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20260108T200326Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260316T161023Z UID:10003868-1772640000-1772643600@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:2026 Ding Shum Lecture: Sanjeev Arora\, Princeton DESCRIPTION:2026 Ding Shum Lecture \nDate: March 4\, 2026 \nTime: 4:00 pm \nLocation: Harvard Science Center Hall D & via Zoom Webinar \nSpeaker: Sanjeev Arora\, Princeton \nTitle: How could a Superhuman AI mathematician come about? \n\nAbstract: Can AI systems exceed the capabilities of the human experts who provided their training data? The talk will examine the hypothesis of AI self‑improvement\, involving mechanisms such as synthetic data generation\, reinforcement learning\, and tool‑augmented reasoning with formal verification loops. \nI will also present recent work at Princeton\, including the Gödel Prover V2 for Lean‑based theorem proving and a new inference pipeline that achieved state‑of‑the‑art performance (at the time of evaluation) on IMO‑ProofBench (Advanced) at moderate inference costs ($20–$30 per problem). These will illustrate how AI systems are sometimes able to escape “cognitive wells”—local optima in a model’s reasoning capabilities. While providing evidence for the feasibility of self‑improvement\, they also highlight important hurdles and open questions. \n\n  \n\n \nSanjeev Arora is Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science and Director of Princeton Language and Intelligence\, a unit devoted to research and applications of large AI models. He got his Phd from UC Berkeley in 1994 and has been a faculty member at Princeton since then. He has been awarded the ACM Prize in Computing (2011)\, Fulkerson Prize in Discrete Mathematics (2012)\, Packard Fellowship\, Sloan Fellowship\, and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Prize. He was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 and is a member of the National Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is made possible by the generous funding of Ding Lei and Harry Shum.\n\n\n  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/2026_dingshum/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Ding Shum Lecture,Event,Public Lecture,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Ding-Shum-2026_hall-d.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20251021T163000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20251021T173000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20250912T180816Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251030T152043Z UID:10003753-1761064200-1761067800@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott | Dennis Gaitsgory\, MPIM | Function-theoretic implications of geometric Langlands DESCRIPTION:Two talks on Function-theoretic implications of geometric Langlands\nDates: October 20 & 21\, 2025 \nTime: 4:30–5:30 pm \nLocation: Science Center Lecture Hall A and via Webinar \nSpeaker: Dennis Gaitsgory\, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics \nAbstract: The recently established geometric Langlands equivalence implies an explicit description of the space of (unramified) automorphic functions in terms of Langlands parameters. In these lectures\, we will derive these description and explain how far we can go with it in order to deduce some expected properties of automorphic functions\, e.g.\, Ramanujan and Arthur multiplicity conjectures. This is joint work with Vincent Lafforgue and Sam Raskin. \n  \nLecture 1: Monday\, October 20\, 2025\nFunction-theoretic implications of geometric Langlands: From geometric to classical Langlands \n \n  \nLecture 2: Tuesday\, October 21\, 2025\nFunction-theoretic implications of geometric Langlands: Analytic properties of automorphic functions as seen from algebraic geometry \n \n\nHarvard Mathematics Professor Raoul Bott (1923 – 2005)\, was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous foundational contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem\, the Morse–Bott functions which he used in this context\, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/mathscibott_2025-2/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event,Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Bott-Lecture_2025-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20251020T163000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20251020T173000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20250912T180641Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251030T151928Z UID:10003752-1760977800-1760981400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott | Dennis Gaitsgory\, MPIM | Function-theoretic implications of geometric Langlands DESCRIPTION:Two talks on Function-theoretic implications of geometric Langlands\nDates: October 20 & 21\, 2025 \nTime: 4:30–5:30 pm \nLocation: Science Center Lecture Hall A and via Webinar \n  \nSpeaker: Dennis Gaitsgory\, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics \nAbstract: The recently established geometric Langlands equivalence implies an explicit description of the space of (unramified) automorphic functions in terms of Langlands parameters. In these lectures\, we will derive these description and explain how far we can go with it in order to deduce some expected properties of automorphic functions\, e.g.\, Ramanujan and Arthur multiplicity conjectures. This is joint work with Vincent Lafforgue and Sam Raskin. \n  \nLecture 1: Monday\, October 20\, 2025\nFrom geometric to classical Langlands \n \n  \nLecture 2: Tuesday\, October 21\, 2025\nAnalytic properties of automorphic functions as seen from algebraic geometry \n \n  \n\nHarvard Mathematics Professor Raoul Bott (1923 – 2005)\, was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous foundational contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem\, the Morse–Bott functions which he used in this context\, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/mathscibott_2025/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event,Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Bott-Lecture_2025.v2-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250916T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250916T180000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20250807T142820Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250922T134159Z UID:10003760-1758042000-1758045600@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Geometry of Machine Learning Special Lecture: Yann LeCun DESCRIPTION:Geometry of Machine Learning Special Lecture: Yann LeCun \nTitle: Self-Supervised Learning\, JEPA\, World Models\, and the future of AI \nDate: Tuesday\, Sep. 16\, 2025 \nTime: 5:00 pm ET \nLocation: Harvard Science Center\, Hall C & via Zoom Webinar URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/lecun91625/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/YannLeCun_GML-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250417T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250417T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20250108T143958Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250422T182732Z UID:10003655-1744905600-1744909200@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Fifth Annual Yip Lecture | Scott Aaronson (UT Austin): How Much Math Is Knowable? DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Scott Aaronson\, Department of Computer Science\, University of Texas\, Austin \nScott Aaronson is the founding director at the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin. \nDate: April 17\, 2025 \nTime: 4:00-5:00 pm ET  (Reception following in the Math Common Room) \nLocation: Harvard Science Center Hall A \n  \nTitle: How Much Math Is Knowable? \nAbstract: Theoretical computer science has over the years sought more and more refined answers to the question of which mathematical truths are knowable by finite beings like ourselves\, bounded in time and space and subject to physical laws.  I’ll tell a story that starts with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s discovery of uncomputability.  I’ll then introduce the spectacular Busy Beaver function\, which grows faster than any computable function.  Work by me and Yedidia\, along with recent improvements by O’Rear and Riebel\, has shown that the value of BB(745) is independent of the axioms of set theory; on the other end\, an international collaboration proved last year that BB(5) = 47\,176\,870.  I’ll speculate on whether BB(6) will ever be known\, by us or our AI successors.  I’ll next discuss the P!=NP conjecture and what it does and doesn’t mean for the limits of machine intelligence.  As my own specialty is quantum computing\, I’ll summarize what we know about how scalable quantum computers\, assuming we get them\, will expand the boundary of what’s mathematically knowable.  I’ll end by talking about hypothetical models even beyond quantum computers\, which might expand the boundary of knowability still further\, if one is able (for example) to jump into a black hole\, create a closed timelike curve\, or project oneself onto the holographic boundary of the universe. \n  \nThe Yip Lecture takes place thanks to the support of Dr. Shing-Yiu Yip. \n  \n\nThe previous Yip Lecture featured Josh Tenenbaum (MIT) who spoke on How to grow a mind from a brain: From guessing and betting to thinking and talking \n  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/yip-2025/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event,Public Lecture,Special Lectures,Yip Lecture Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Yip_2025.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250404T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250405T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20241213T155434Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250415T134135Z UID:10003651-1743757200-1743872400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Current Developments in Mathematics 2025 DESCRIPTION:When: April 4\, 2025 – April 5\, 2025\n\n\nWhere: Science Center Hall C \nAddress: 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA 02138\, United States\n\nSpeaker: Michael Chapman – NYU | Pazit Haim-Kislev – Institute for Advanced Study | Jianfeng Lin – Tsinghua University | Laura Monk – University of Bristol | Ramon van Handel – Princeton University\n\nIN-PERSON REGISTRATION\nLimited funding to help defray travel expenses is available for graduate students and recent PhDs. If you are a graduate student or postdoc and would like to apply for support\, please register and send a letter to cdm@math.harvard.edu. \nA letter indicating your name\, address\, current status\, university affiliation\, citizenship\, and area of study. F1 visa holders are eligible to apply for support. If you are a graduate student\, please send a brief letter of recommendation from a faculty member to explain the relevance of the conference to your studies or research. \nDetailed schedule of lectures and events coming soon. \nOrganizers: David Jerison\, Paul Seidel\, Nike Sun (MIT); Denis Auroux\, Mark Kisin\, Lauren Williams\, Horng-Tzer Yau\, Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard). \nSponsored by the National Science Foundation (pending)\, Harvard University Mathematics\, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \nHarvard University is committed to maintaining a safe and healthy educational and work environment in which no member of the University community is\, on the basis of sex\, sexual orientation\, or gender identity\, excluded from participation in\, denied the benefits of\, or subjected to discrimination in any University program or activity. More information can be found here. \n\n\nCurrent Developments in Mathematics 2025 \n \n  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/cdm2025/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Conference,Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CDM-2025-Poster-1115-scaled-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250213T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250213T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20240708T151711Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250328T150436Z UID:10003396-1739462400-1739466000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:2025 Ding Shum Lecture: Irit Dinur\, IAS: Expanders from local to global DESCRIPTION:  \n \nOn February 13\, 2025 the CMSA hosted the sixth annual Ding Shum Lecture\, given by Irit Dinur\, Institute for Advanced Study. \nLocation: Harvard Science Center  Hall A & via Zoom Webinar \nSpeaker: Irit Dinur\, Institute for Advanced Study \n\n\n\nTitle: Expanders from local to global \nAbstract: Imagine a network—like a social network\, a transportation system\, or even a biological system—where every part of the network is robustly connected to the rest. Expander graphs are the mathematical idealization of such networks. They are structures where any small group of points (nodes) has many connections to the rest of the graph\, ensuring that no part is isolated and information (or influence) spreads efficiently throughout.\nWe will begin by surveying expander graphs\, their discovery and construction\, and some fascinating applications such as error-correcting codes\, pseudorandomness\, and probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs)\, highlighting their role as a foundation for many breakthroughs in theoretical computer science. Then\, we will shift focus to an exciting new kind of expanders called high dimensional expanders (HDXs). While expanders are well-understood and widely applied\, HDXs remain enigmatic\, with potential that we are only starting to uncover. We will talk about a fascinating local to global feature that HDXs have\, and some applications. \n\n \n\n\n\n\nThis event is made possible by the generous funding of Ding Lei and Harry Shum.\n\n\n  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/2025_dingshum/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Ding Shum Lecture,Event,Public Lecture,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/DIngShum_21325.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20241017T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20241017T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20240927T150813Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250409T192551Z UID:10002916-1729180800-1729184400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott: Andrew Neitzke DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Andrew Neitzke\, Yale University \nLocation: Harvard University Science Center Hall D & via Zoom webinar \nDates: October 16 & 17\, 2024 \nTime: 4:00 pm \n  \n \nWednesday\, Oct. 16\, 2024 \nTitle: Abelianization in analysis of ODEs \nAbstract: I will describe the exact WKB method for asymptotic analysis of families of ODEs in one variable\, and its interpretation as a kind of abelianization procedure\, which replaces GL(N)-connections over a Riemann surface by GL(1)-connections over an N-fold branched cover. This abelianization procedure connects exact WKB to various subjects in geometry (cluster algebras\, moduli of Higgs bundles\, enumerative geometry). One application is a conjectural description of Hitchin’s hyperkahler metric on the moduli of Higgs bundles; I will review some recent progress on these conjectures. \n  \n \nThursday\, Oct. 17\, 2024 \nTitle: Abelianization in quantum topology \nAbstract: I will describe new applications of abelianization to various related subjects: perturbative Chern-Simons invariants\, skein algebras\, and conformal blocks. The aim is to explain how abelianization gives a unifying perspective on constructions familiar in each of these subjects (e.g. dilogarithmic formulas for Chern-Simons invariants\, vertex models for computing quantum invariants of links\, and iterated-fusion constructions of conformal blocks for the Virasoro algebra)\, and also suggests various extensions\, which are just beginning to be explored. \n\n  \nRaoul Bott (9/24/1923 – 12/20/2005) is known for the Bott periodicity theorem\, the Morse–Bott functions\, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem.  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/mathscibott_1024-2/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event,Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott,Public Lecture,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Bott-Lecture_Neitzke_11x17.1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20241016T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20241016T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20240927T150643Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250328T150459Z UID:10002915-1729094400-1729098000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott: Andrew Neitzke DESCRIPTION:  \nSpeaker: Andrew Neitzke\, Yale University \nLocation: Harvard University Science Center Hall D & via Zoom webinar \nDates: October 16 & 17\, 2024 \nTime: 4:00 pm \n  \n \nWednesday\, Oct. 16\, 2024 \nTitle: Abelianization in analysis of ODEs \nAbstract: I will describe the exact WKB method for asymptotic analysis of families of ODEs in one variable\, and its interpretation as a kind of abelianization procedure\, which replaces GL(N)-connections over a Riemann surface by GL(1)-connections over an N-fold branched cover. This abelianization procedure connects exact WKB to various subjects in geometry (cluster algebras\, moduli of Higgs bundles\, enumerative geometry). One application is a conjectural description of Hitchin’s hyperkahler metric on the moduli of Higgs bundles; I will review some recent progress on these conjectures. \n  \n \nThursday\, Oct. 17\, 2024 \nTitle: Abelianization in quantum topology \nAbstract: I will describe new applications of abelianization to various related subjects: perturbative Chern-Simons invariants\, skein algebras\, and conformal blocks. The aim is to explain how abelianization gives a unifying perspective on constructions familiar in each of these subjects (e.g. dilogarithmic formulas for Chern-Simons invariants\, vertex models for computing quantum invariants of links\, and iterated-fusion constructions of conformal blocks for the Virasoro algebra)\, and also suggests various extensions\, which are just beginning to be explored. \n  \n\nRaoul Bott (9/24/1923 – 12/20/2005) is known for the Bott periodicity theorem\, the Morse–Bott functions\, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem.  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/mathscibott_1024/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event,Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott,Public Lecture,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Bott-Lecture_Neitzke_11x17.1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240502T110000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240502T120000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20240415T174619Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240502T144153Z UID:10003364-1714647600-1714651200@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Mathematical Aspects of Scattering Amplitudes Lecture DESCRIPTION:Mathematical Aspects of Scattering Amplitudes Lecture \nSpeaker: Daniil Rudenko\, U Chicago \nTitle: Introduction to Cluster Polylogarithms \nLocation: Harvard Science Center 310 URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/scatteringamplitudes_5224dr/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Scattering Amplitudes Lectures END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240405T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240406T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20240105T070812Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250305T204914Z UID:10001118-1712325600-1712422800@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Current Developments in Mathematics Conference 2024 DESCRIPTION:CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS IN MATHEMATICS 2024\nAPRIL 5-6\, 2024\nHARVARD UNIVERSITY SCIENCE CENTER\nLECTURE HALL C\nhttps://www.math.harvard.edu/event/current-developments-in-mathematics-2024/\n  \n\nSpeakers:\nDaniel Cristofaro-Gardiner – University of Maryland\nSamit Dasgupta – Duke University\nJiaoyang Huang – University of Pennsylvania\nDaniel Litt – University of Toronto\nLisa Piccirillo – MIT/University of Texas\n\n\n\n\nDownload PDF for a detailed schedule of lectures and events. \n  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFriday\, April 5 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSaturday\, April 6 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n1:30 p.m. – 2:20 p.m. Part 1\n2:20 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Break\n2:30 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. Part 2\n\nJiaoyang Huang \nRandom Matrix Statistics and Airy Line Ensembles \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n9:05 a.m. – 9:55 a.m. Part 1\n9:55 a.m. – 10:05 a.m. Break\n10:05 a.m. – 10:55 a.m. Part 2\n\nDaniel Litt \nMotives\, mapping class groups\, and monodromy \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n3:20 p.m. – 3:35 p.m. \nBreak \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n10:55 a.m. – 11:10 a.m. \nBreak \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n3:35 p.m. – 4:25 p.m. Part 1\n4:25 p.m. – 4:35 p.m. Break\n4:35 p.m. – 5:25 p.m. Part 2\n\nLisa Piccirillo \nExotic phenomena in dimension 4 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n11:10 a.m. – 12 p.m. Part 1\n12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Lunch\n1:30 p.m. – 2:20 p.m. Part 2\n\nSamit Dasgupta \nStark’s conjectures and explicit class field theory \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n2:20 p.m. – 2:35 p.m. \nBreak \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n2:35 p.m. – 3:25 p.m. Part 1\n3:25 p.m. – 3:35 p.m. Break\n3:35 p.m. – 4:25 p.m. Part 2\n\nDan Cristofaro-Gardiner \nLow-dimensional topology and dynamics \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n  \n  \nOrganizers: David Jerison\, Paul Seidel\, Nike Sun (MIT); Denis Auroux\, Mark Kisin\, Lauren Williams\, Horng-Tzer Yau\, Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard). \nSponsored by the National Science Foundation\, Harvard University Mathematics\, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \nHarvard University is committed to maintaining a safe and healthy educational and work environment in which no member of the University community is\, on the basis of sex\, sexual orientation\, or gender identity\, excluded from participation in\, denied the benefits of\, or subjected to discrimination in any University program or activity. More information can be found here. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/cdm-2024/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Conference ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Updated-2024-CDM-Poster-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240328T163000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240328T173000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20240103T175709Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250409T192237Z UID:10001105-1711643400-1711647000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:2024 Ding Shum Lecture: Yann LeCun: Objective-Driven AI: Towards AI systems that can learn\, remember\, reason\, and plan DESCRIPTION:LECTURE SLIDES (pdf) \nOn March 28\, 2024\, the CMSA will host the fifth annual Ding Shum Lecture\, given by Yann LeCun. \nTime: 4:30–5:30 pm ET \nSpeaker: Yann Lecun\, New York University & META \nLocation: Harvard Science Center  Hall A & via Zoom Webinar \nTitle: Objective-Driven AI: Towards AI systems that can learn\, remember\, reason\, and plan \n\n\nAbstract: \nHow could machines learn as efficiently as humans and animals? \nHow could machines learn how the world works and acquire common sense? \nHow could machines learn to reason and plan? \nCurrent AI architectures\, such as Auto-Regressive Large Language Models fall short. I will propose a modular cognitive architecture that may constitute a path towards answering these questions. The centerpiece of the architecture is a predictive world model that allows the system to predict the consequences of its actions and to plan a sequence of actions that optimize a set of objectives. The objectives include guardrails that guarantee the system’s controllability and safety. The world model employs a Hierarchical Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (H-JEPA) trained with self-supervised learning. The JEPA learns abstract representations of the percepts that are simultaneously maximally informative and maximally predictable. The corresponding working paper is available here: https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is made possible by the generous funding of Ding Lei and Harry Shum. \n  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/2024_dingshum/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Ding Shum Lecture,Event,Public Lecture,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Ding-Shum-2024_8.5x11.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240229T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240229T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20240103T185919Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250409T192246Z UID:10001107-1709222400-1709226000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Fourth Annual Yip Lecture | Josh Tenenbaum | How to grow a mind from a brain: From guessing and betting to thinking and talking DESCRIPTION:Josh Tenenbaum gave the Fourth Annual Yip Lecture on February 29\, 2024. \nTitle: How to grow a mind from a brain: From guessing and betting to thinking and talking\nTime: 4:00-5:00 pm ET \nLocation: Harvard Science Center \nThe Yip Lecture takes place thanks to the support of Dr. Shing-Yiu Yip. \n \n\nThe previous Yip Lecture featured Andrew Strominger (Harvard)\, who spoke on Black Holes. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/yip-2024/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event,Public Lecture,Special Lectures,Yip Lecture Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Tenenbaum-1_MIT-768x513-1.jpeg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240220T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240220T173000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20240301T093539Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250328T150527Z UID:10002892-1708444800-1708450200@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott: Maggie Miller: Fibered ribbon knots vs. major 4D conjectures DESCRIPTION:Fibered ribbon knots vs. major 4D conjectures \nLocation: Harvard University Science Center Hall A & via Zoom webinar \nDates: Feb 20 & 22\, 2024 \nTime: 4:00-5:30 pm \nMaggie Miller is an assistant professor in the mathematics department at the University of Texas at Austin and a Clay Research Fellow. \nThis is the fourth annual Math Science Lecture Series held in Honor of Raoul Bott. \nTalk topic:  Fibered ribbon knots vs. major 4D conjectures\n  \n \nFeb. 20\, 2024 \nTitle: Fibered ribbon knots and the Poincaré conjecture \nAbstract: A knot is “fibered” if its complement in S^3 is the total space of a bundle over the circle\, and ribbon if it bounds a smooth disk into B^4 with no local maxima with respect to radial height. A theorem of Casson-Gordon from 1983 implies that if a fibered ribbon knot does not bound any fibered disk in B^4\, then the smooth 4D Poincaré conjecture is false. I’ll show that unfortunately (?) many ribbon disks bounded by fibered knots are fibered\, giving some criteria for extending fibrations and discuss how one might search for non-fibered examples. \n  \n \nFeb. 22\, 2024 \nTitle: Fibered knots and the slice-ribbon conjecture \nAbstract: The slice-ribbon conjecture (Fox\, 1962) posits that if a knot bounds any smooth disk into B^4\, it also bounds a ribbon disk. The previously discussed work of Casson-Gordon yields an obstruction to many fibered knots being ribbon\, yielding many interesting potential counterexamples to this conjecture — if any happy to bound a non-ribbon disk. In 2022\, Dai-Kong-Mallick-Park-Stoffregen showed that unfortunately( ?) many of these knots don’t bound a smooth disk into B^4 and thus can’t disprove the conjecture. I’ll show a simple alternate proof that a certain interesting knot (the (2\,1)-cable of the figure eight) isn’t slice and discuss remaining open questions. This talk is joint with Paolo Aceto\, Nickolas Castro\, JungHwan Park\, and Andras Stipsicz. \n  \nTalk Chair: Cliff Taubes (Harvard Mathematics) \nModerator: Freid Tong (Harvard CMSA) \n\nRaoul Bott (9/24/1923 – 12/20/2005) is known for the Bott periodicity theorem\, the Morse–Bott functions\, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/mathscibott_2024/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Math Science Lectures in Honor of Raoul Bott,Public Lecture,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Bott-Lecture_Maggie-Miller_letter_web.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20231027 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20231029 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230904T060021Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240624T182341Z UID:10000002-1698364800-1698537599@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Mathematics in Science: Perspectives and Prospects DESCRIPTION:Mathematics in Science: Perspectives and Prospects\nA showcase of mathematics in interaction with physics\, computer science\, biology\, and beyond. \nOctober 27–28\, 2023 \nLocation: Harvard University Science Center Hall D & via Zoom. \nDirections and Recommended Lodging \nMathematics in Science: Perspectives and Prospects Youtube Playlist \n  \n\nSpeakers \n\nNima Arkani-Hamed (IAS)\nConstantinos Daskalakis (MIT)\nAlison Etheridge (Oxford)\nMike Freedman (Harvard CMSA)\nGreg Moore (Rutgers)\nBernd Sturmfels (MPI Leipzig)\n\n\nOrganizers \n\nMichael R. Douglas (Harvard CMSA)\nDan Freed (Harvard Math & CMSA)\nMike Hopkins (Harvard Math)\nCumrun Vafa (Harvard Physics)\nHorng-Tzer Yau (Harvard Math)\n\nSchedule\nFriday\, October 27\, 2023 \n\n\n\n2:00–3:15 pm\n\nGreg Moore (Rutgers) \nTitle: Remarks on Physical Mathematics \nAbstract: I will describe some examples of the vigorous modern dialogue between mathematics and theoretical physics (especially high energy and condensed matter physics). I will begin by recalling Stokes’ phenomenon and explain how it is related to some notable developments in quantum field theory from the past 30 years. Time permitting\, I might also say something about the dialogue between mathematicians working on the differential topology of four-manifolds and physicists working on supersymmetric quantum field theories. But I haven’t finished writing the talk yet\, so I don’t know how it will end any more than you do. \nSlides (PDF) \n \n\n\n\n3:15–3:45 pm\nBreak\n\n\n3:45–5:00 pm\n\nBernd Sturmfels (MPI Leipzig) \nTitle: Algebraic Varieties in Quantum Chemistry \nAbstract: We discuss the algebraic geometry behind coupled cluster (CC) theory of quantum many-body systems. The high-dimensional eigenvalue problems that encode the electronic Schroedinger equation are approximated by a hierarchy of polynomial systems at various levels of truncation. The exponential parametrization of the eigenstates gives rise to truncation varieties. These generalize Grassmannians in their Pluecker embedding. We explain how to derive Hamiltonians\, we offer a detailed study of truncation varieties and their CC degrees\, and we present the state of the art in solving the CC equations. This is joint work with Fabian Faulstich and Svala Sverrisdóttir. \nSlides (PDF) \n \n\n\n\n\n  \nSaturday\, October 28\, 2023 \n\n\n\n9:00 am\nBreakfast\n\n\n9:30–10:45 am\n\nMike Freedman (Harvard CMSA) \nTitle: ML\, QML\, and Dynamics: What mathematics can help us understand and advance machine learning? \nAbstract: Vannila deep neural nets DNN repeatedly stretch and fold. They are reminiscent of the logistic map and the Smale horseshoe.  What kind of dynamics is responsible for their expressivity and trainability. Is chaos playing a role? Is the Kolmogorov Arnold representation theorem relevant? Large language models are full of linear maps. Might we look for emergent tensor structures in these highly trained maps in analogy with emergent tensor structures at local minima of certain loss functions in high-energy physics. \nSlides (PDF) \n \n\n\n\n10:45–11:15 am\nBreak\n\n\n11:15 am–12:30 pmvia Zoom\n\nNima Arkani-Hamed (IAS) \nTitle: All-Loop Scattering as A Counting Problem \nAbstract: I will describe a new understanding of scattering amplitudes based on fundamentally combinatorial ideas in the kinematic space of the scattering data. I first discuss a toy model\, the simplest theory of colored scalar particles with cubic interactions\, at all loop orders and to all orders in the topological ‘t Hooft expansion. I will present a novel formula for loop-integrated amplitudes\, with no trace of the conventional sum over Feynman diagrams\, but instead determined by a beautifully simple counting problem attached to any order of the topological expansion. A surprisingly simple shift of kinematic variables converts this apparent toy model into the realistic physics of pions and Yang-Mills theory. These results represent a significant step forward in the decade-long quest to formulate the fundamental physics of the real world in a new language\, where the rules of spacetime and quantum mechanics\, as reflected in the principles of locality and unitarity\, are seen to emerge from deeper mathematical structures. \n \n\n\n\n12:30–2:00 pm\nLunch break\n\n\n2:00–3:15 pm\n\nConstantinos Daskalakis (MIT) \nTitle: How to train deep neural nets to think strategically \nAbstract: Many outstanding challenges in Deep Learning lie at its interface with Game Theory: from playing difficult games like Go to robustifying classifiers against adversarial attacks\, training deep generative models\, and training DNN-based models to interact with each other and with humans. In these applications\, the utilities that the agents aim to optimize are non-concave in the parameters of the underlying DNNs; as a result\, Nash equilibria fail to exist\, and standard equilibrium analysis is inapplicable. So how can one train DNNs to be strategic? What is even the goal of the training? We shed light on these challenges through a combination of learning-theoretic\, complexity-theoretic\, game-theoretic and topological techniques\, presenting obstacles and opportunities for Deep Learning and Game Theory going forward. \nSlides (PDF) \n \n\n\n\n3:15–3:45 pm\nBreak\n\n\n3:45–5:00 pm\n\nAlison Etheridge (Oxford) \nTitle: Modelling hybrid zones \nAbstract: Mathematical models play a fundamental role in theoretical population genetics and\, in turn\, population genetics provides a wealth of mathematical challenges. In this lecture we investigate the interplay between a particular (ubiquitous) form of natural selection\, spatial structure\, and\, if time permits\, so-called genetic drift. A simple mathematical caricature will uncover the importance of the shape of the domain inhabited by a species for the effectiveness of natural selection. \nSlides (PDF) \n \n\n\n\n\nLimited funding to help defray travel expenses is available for graduate students and recent PhDs. If you are a graduate student or postdoc and would like to apply for support\, please register above and send an email to mathsci2023@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu no later than October 9\, 2023. \nPlease include your name\, address\, current status\, university affiliation\, citizenship\, and area of study. F1 visa holders are eligible to apply for support. If you are a graduate student\, please send a brief letter of recommendation from a faculty member to explain the relevance of the conference to your studies or research. If you are a postdoc\, please include a copy of your CV. \n\n  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/mathematics-in-science/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Conference,Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/MathScience2023Poster_8.5x11.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230831T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230901T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230904T063654Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251026T043812Z UID:10000820-1693472400-1693587600@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Big Data Conference 2023 DESCRIPTION:On August 31-Sep 1\, 2023 the CMSA hosted the ninth annual Conference on Big Data. 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. \nSpeakers: \n\nJacob Andreas\, MIT\nMorgane Austern\, Harvard\nAlbert-László Barabási\, Northeastern\nRachel Cummings\, Columbia\nMelissa Dell\, Harvard\nJianqing Fan\, Princeton\nTommi Jaakkola\, MIT\nAnkur Moitra\, MIT\nMark Sellke\, Harvard\nMarinka Zitnik\, Harvard Medical School\n\nOrganizers: \n\nMichael Douglas\, CMSA\, Harvard University\nYannai Gonczarowski\, Economics and Computer Science\, Harvard University\nLucas Janson\, Statistics and Computer Science\, Harvard University\nTracy Ke\, Statistics\, Harvard University\nHorng-Tzer Yau\, Mathematics and CMSA\, Harvard University\nYue Lu\, Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics\, Harvard University\n\nSchedule\n(PDF download) \nThursday\, August 31\, 2023 \n\n\n\n9:00 AM\nBreakfast\n\n\n9:30 AM\nIntroductions\n\n\n9:45–10:45 AM\nAlbert-László Barabási (Northeastern\, Harvard) \nTitle: From Network Medicine to the Foodome: The Dark Matter of Nutrition \nAbstract: A disease is rarely a consequence of an abnormality in a single gene but reflects perturbations to the complex intracellular network. Network medicine offer a platform to explore systematically not only the molecular complexity of a particular disease\, leading to the identification of disease modules and pathways\, but also the molecular relationships between apparently distinct (patho) phenotypes. As an application\, I will explore how we use network medicine to uncover the role individual food molecules in our health. Indeed\, our current understanding of how diet affects our health is limited to the role of 150 key nutritional components systematically tracked by the USDA and other national databases in all foods. Yet\, these nutritional components represent only a tiny fraction of the over 135\,000 distinct\, definable biochemicals present in our food. While many of these biochemicals have documented effects on health\, they remain unquantified in any systematic fashion across different individual foods. Their invisibility to experimental\, clinical\, and epidemiological studies defines them as the ‘Dark Matter of Nutrition.’ I will speak about our efforts to develop a high-resolution library of this nutritional dark matter\, and efforts to understand the role of these molecules on health\, opening novel avenues by which to understand\, avoid\, and control disease. \nhttps://youtu.be/UmgzUwi6K3E\n\n\n10:45–11:00 AM\nBreak\n\n\n11:00 AM–12:00 PM\nRachel Cummings (Columbia) \nTitle: Differentially Private Algorithms for Statistical Estimation Problems \nAbstract: Differential privacy (DP) is widely regarded as a gold standard for privacy-preserving computation over users’ data.  It is a parameterized notion of database privacy that gives a rigorous worst-case bound on the information that can be learned about any one individual from the result of a data analysis task. Algorithmically it is achieved by injecting carefully calibrated randomness into the analysis to balance privacy protections with accuracy of the results.\nIn this talk\, we will survey recent developments in the development of DP algorithms for three important statistical problems\, namely online learning with bandit feedback\, causal interference\, and learning from imbalanced data. For the first problem\, we will show that Thompson sampling — a standard bandit algorithm developed in the 1930s — already satisfies DP due to the inherent randomness of the algorithm. For the second problem of causal inference and counterfactual estimation\, we develop the first DP algorithms for synthetic control\, which has been used non-privately for this task for decades. Finally\, for the problem of imbalanced learning\, where one class is severely underrepresented in the training data\, we show that combining existing techniques such as minority oversampling perform very poorly when applied as pre-processing before a DP learning algorithm; instead we propose novel approaches for privately generating synthetic minority points. \nBased on joint works with Marco Avella Medina\, Vishal Misra\, Yuliia Lut\, Tingting Ou\, Saeyoung Rho\, and Ethan Turok. \nhttps://youtu.be/0cPE6rb1Roo\n\n\n12:00–1:30 PM\nLunch\n\n\n1:30–2:30 PM\nMorgane Austern (Harvard) \nTitle: To split or not to split that is the question: From cross validation to debiased machine learning \nAbstract: Data splitting is a ubiquitous method in statistics with examples ranging from cross-validation to cross-fitting. However\, despite its prevalence\, theoretical guidance regarding its use is still lacking. In this talk\, we will explore two examples and establish an asymptotic theory for it. In the first part of this talk\, we study the cross-validation method\, a ubiquitous method for risk estimation\, and establish its asymptotic properties for a large class of models and with an arbitrary number of folds. Under stability conditions\, we establish a central limit theorem and Berry-Esseen bounds for the cross-validated risk\, which enable us to compute asymptotically accurate confidence intervals. Using our results\, we study the statistical speed-up offered by cross-validation compared to a train-test split procedure. We reveal some surprising behavior of the cross-validated risk and establish the statistically optimal choice for the number of folds. In the second part of this talk\, we study the role of cross-fitting in the generalized method of moments with moments that also depend on some auxiliary functions. Recent lines of work show how one can use generic machine learning estimators for these auxiliary problems\, while maintaining asymptotic normality and root-n consistency of the target parameter of interest. The literature typically requires that these auxiliary problems are fitted on a separate sample or in a cross-fitting manner. We show that when these auxiliary estimation algorithms satisfy natural leave-one-out stability properties\, then sample splitting is not required. This allows for sample reuse\, which can be beneficial in moderately sized sample regimes. \nhttps://youtu.be/L_pHxgoQSgU\n\n\n2:30–2:45 PM\nBreak\n\n\n2:45–3:45 PM\nAnkur Moitra (MIT) \nTitle: Learning from Dynamics \nAbstract: Linear dynamical systems are the canonical model for time series data. They have wide-ranging applications and there is a vast literature on learning their parameters from input-output sequences. Moreover they have received renewed interest because of their connections to recurrent neural networks.\nBut there are wide gaps in our understanding. Existing works have only asymptotic guarantees or else make restrictive assumptions\, e.g. that preclude having any long-range correlations. In this work\, we give a new algorithm based on the method of moments that is computationally efficient and works under essentially minimal assumptions. Our work points to several missed connections\, whereby tools from theoretical machine learning including tensor methods\, can be used in non-stationary settings. \nhttps://youtu.be/UmgzUwi6K3E\n\n\n3:45–4:00 PM\nBreak\n\n\n4:00–5:00 PM\nMark Sellke (Harvard) \nTitle: Algorithmic Thresholds for Spherical Spin Glasses \nAbstract: High-dimensional optimization plays a crucial role in modern statistics and machine learning. I will present recent progress on non-convex optimization problems with random objectives\, focusing on the spherical p-spin glass. This model is related to spiked tensor estimation and has been studied in probability and physics for decades. We will see that a natural class of “stable” optimization algorithms gets stuck at an algorithmic threshold related to geometric properties of the landscape. The algorithmic threshold value is efficiently attained via Langevin dynamics or by a second-order ascent method of Subag. Much of this picture extends to other models\, such as random constraint satisfaction problems at high clause density. \nhttps://youtu.be/JoghiwiIbT8\n\n\n6:00 – 8:00 PM\nBanquet for organizers and speakers\n\n\n\n  \nFriday\, September 1\, 2023 \n\n\n\n9:00 AM\nBreakfast\n\n\n9:30 AM\nIntroductions\n\n\n9:45–10:45 AM\nJacob Andreas (MIT) \nTitle: What Learning Algorithm is In-Context Learning? \nAbstract: Neural sequence models\, especially transformers\, exhibit a remarkable capacity for “in-context” learning. They can construct new predictors from sequences of labeled examples (x\,f(x)) presented in the input without further parameter updates. I’ll present recent findings suggesting that transformer-based in-context learners implement standard learning algorithms implicitly\, by encoding smaller models in their activations\, and updating these implicit models as new examples appear in the context\, using in-context linear regression as a model problem. First\, I’ll show by construction that transformers can implement learning algorithms for linear models based on gradient descent and closed-form ridge regression. Second\, I’ll show that trained in-context learners closely match the predictors computed by gradient descent\, ridge regression\, and exact least-squares regression\, transitioning between different predictors as transformer depth and dataset noise vary\, and converging to Bayesian estimators for large widths and depths. Finally\, we present preliminary evidence that in-context learners share algorithmic features with these predictors: learners’ late layers non-linearly encode weight vectors and moment matrices. These results suggest that in-context learning is understandable in algorithmic terms\, and that (at least in the linear case) learners may rediscover standard estimation algorithms. This work is joint with Ekin Akyürek at MIT\, and Dale Schuurmans\, Tengyu Ma and Denny Zhou at Stanford. \nhttps://youtu.be/UNVl64G3BzA\n\n\n10:45–11:00 AM\nBreak\n\n\n11:00 AM–12:00 PM\nTommi Jaakkola (MIT) \nTitle: Generative modeling and physical processes \nAbstract: Rapidly advancing deep distributional modeling techniques offer a number of opportunities for complex generative tasks\, from natural sciences such as molecules and materials to engineering. I will discuss generative approaches inspired from physical processes including diffusion models and more recent electrostatic models (Poisson flow)\, and how they relate to each other in terms of embedding dimension. From the point of view of applications\, I will highlight our recent work on SE(3) invariant distributional modeling over backbone 3D structures with ability to generate designable monomers without relying on pre-trained protein structure prediction methods as well as state of the art image generation capabilities (Poisson flow). Time permitting\, I will also discuss recent analysis of efficiency of sample generation in such models. \nhttps://youtu.be/GLEwQAWQ85E\n\n\n12:00–1:30 PM\nLunch\n\n\n1:30–2:30 PM\nMarinka Zitnik (Harvard Medical School) \nTitle: Multimodal Learning on Graphs \nAbstract: Understanding biological and natural systems requires modeling data with underlying geometric relationships across scales and modalities such as biological sequences\, chemical constraints\, and graphs of 3D spatial or biological interactions. I will discuss unique challenges for learning from multimodal datasets that are due to varying inductive biases across modalities and the potential absence of explicit graphs in the input. I will describe a framework for structure-inducing pretraining that allows for a comprehensive study of how relational structure can be induced in pretrained language models. We use the framework to explore new graph pretraining objectives that impose relational structure in the induced latent spaces—i.e.\, pretraining objectives that explicitly impose structural constraints on the distance or geometry of pretrained models. Applications in genomic medicine and therapeutic science will be discussed. These include TxGNN\, an AI model enabling zero-shot prediction of therapeutic use across over 17\,000 diseases\, and PINNACLE\, a contextual graph AI model dynamically adjusting its outputs to contexts in which it operates. PINNACLE enhances 3D protein structure representations and predicts the effects of drugs at single-cell resolution. \nhttps://youtu.be/hjt4nsN_8iM\n\n\n2:30–2:45 PM\nBreak\n\n\n2:45–3:45 PM\nJianqing Fan (Princeton) \nTitle: UTOPIA: Universally Trainable Optimal Prediction Intervals Aggregation \nAbstract: Uncertainty quantification for prediction is an intriguing problem with significant applications in various fields\, such as biomedical science\, economic studies\, and weather forecasts. Numerous methods are available for constructing prediction intervals\, such as quantile regression and conformal predictions\, among others. Nevertheless\, model misspecification (especially in high-dimension) or sub-optimal constructions can frequently result in biased or unnecessarily-wide prediction intervals. In this work\, we propose a novel and widely applicable technique for aggregating multiple prediction intervals to minimize the average width of the prediction band along with coverage guarantee\, called Universally Trainable Optimal Predictive Intervals Aggregation (UTOPIA). The method also allows us to directly construct predictive bands based on elementary basis functions.  Our approach is based on linear or convex programming which is easy to implement. All of our proposed methodologies are supported by theoretical guarantees on the coverage probability and optimal average length\, which are detailed in this paper. The effectiveness of our approach is convincingly demonstrated by applying it to synthetic data and two real datasets on finance and macroeconomics. (Joint work Jiawei Ge and Debarghya Mukherjee). \nhttps://youtu.be/WY6dr1oEOrk\n\n\n3:45–4:00 PM\nBreak\n\n\n4:00–5:00 PM\nMelissa Dell (Harvard) \nTitle: Efficient OCR for Building a Diverse Digital History \nAbstract: Many users consult digital archives daily\, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) – which jointly learns a vision and language model – is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections\, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character-level image retrieval problem\, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters’ visual features\, it is more sample-efficient and extensible than existing architectures\, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially\, it opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history. \nhttps://youtu.be/u0JY9vURUAs\n\n\n\n  \n\nInformation about the 2022 Big Data Conference can be found here. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/bigdata_2023/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Big Data Conference,Conference,Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Big-Data-2023_letter-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230511T133000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230511T143000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230808T180145Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240111T084858Z UID:10001199-1683811800-1683815400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:How do the eigenvalues of a large non-Hermitian random matrix behave? DESCRIPTION:Probability Seminar \nSpeaker: Giorgio Cipolloni (Princeton) \nTitle: How do the eigenvalues of a large non-Hermitian random matrix behave? \nAbstract: We prove that the fluctuations of the eigenvalues converge to the Gaussian Free Field (GFF) on the unit disk. These fluctuations appear on a non-natural scale\, due to strong correlations between the eigenvalues. Then\, motivated by the long time behaviour of the ODE \dot{u}=Xu\, we give a precise estimate on the eigenvalue with the largest real part and on the spectral radius of X. \nLocation: Science Center Room 232 URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/probability-51123/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Probability Seminar ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CMSA-Probability-Seminar-05.11.23.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230410T150000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230410T160000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230808T174720Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240111T070433Z UID:10001194-1681138800-1681142400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Localization for random band matrices DESCRIPTION:Probability Seminar \n*Please note room change: Science Center 232* \n\nSpeaker: Ron Peled (Tel Aviv University) \nTitle: Localization for random band matrices \nAbstract: I will explain an approach via “an adaptive Mermin-Wagner style shift” which proves localization of N x N Gaussian random band matrices with band width W satisfying W << N^{1/4}. \nJoint work with Giorgio Cipolloni\, Jeffrey Schenker and Jacob Shapiro. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/probability-41023/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Probability Seminar ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CMSA-Probability-Seminar-04.10.23.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230407T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230408T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230705T055126Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240229T095034Z UID:10000067-1680876000-1680973200@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Current Developments in Mathematics Conference 2023 DESCRIPTION:Current Developments in Mathematics 2023\nHarvard University Science Center\, Lecture Hall C\nApril 7-8\, 2023\nSpeakers: \nAmol Aggarwal – Columbia University\nBhargav Bhatt – Institute for Advanced Study\, Princeton University\, & University of Michigan\nPaul Bourgade – New York University\, Courant Institute\nVesselin Dimitrov – Institute for Advanced Study & Georgia Institute of Technology\nGreta Panova – University of Southern California\n\n\n\n\nFor more information\, and to register\, please visit:\nCurrent Developments in Mathematics 2023 \n \n  \nOrganizers: David Jerison\, Paul Seidel\, Nike Sun (MIT); Denis Auroux\, Mark Kisin\, Lauren Williams\, Horng-Tzer Yau \nSponsored by the National Science Foundation\, Harvard University Mathematics\, Harvard University Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications\, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \nHarvard University is committed to maintaining a safe and healthy educational and work environment in which no member of the University community is\, on the basis of sex\, sexual orientation\, or gender identity\, excluded from participation in\, denied the benefits of\, or subjected to discrimination in any University program or activity. More information can be found here. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/cdm-2023/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Conference,Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CDM-2023-Poster.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230321T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230321T180000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230705T053409Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250409T192224Z UID:10000065-1679418000-1679421600@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:2023 Ding Shum Lecture DESCRIPTION:On March 21\, 2023\, the CMSA hosted the fourth annual Ding Shum Lecture\, given by Cynthia Dwork (Harvard SEAS and Microsoft Research). \n\n\nTime: 5:00-6:00 pm ET \nLocation: Harvard University Science Center Hall D \nThis event was be held in person and via Zoom webinar. \n\n  \n\nTitle: Measuring Our Chances: Risk Prediction in This World and its Betters \nAbstract: Prediction algorithms score individuals\, assigning a number between zero and one that is often interpreted as an individual probability: a 0.7 “chance” that this child is in danger in the home; an 80% “probability” that this woman will succeed if hired; a 1/3 “likelihood” that they will graduate within 4 years of admission. But what do words like “chance\,” “probability\,” and “likelihood” actually mean for a non-repeatable activity like going to college? This is a deep and unresolved problem in the philosophy of probability. Without a compelling mathematical definition we cannot specify what an (imagined) perfect risk prediction algorithm should produce\, nor even how an existing algorithm should be evaluated. Undaunted\, AI and machine learned algorithms churn these numbers out in droves\, sometimes with life-altering consequences. \nAn explosion of recent research deploys insights from the theory of pseudo-random numbers – sequences of 0’s and 1’s that “look random” but in fact have structure – to yield a tantalizing answer to the evaluation problem\, together with a supporting algorithmic framework with roots in the theory of algorithmic fairness. \nWe can aim even higher. Both (1) our qualifications\, health\, and skills\, which form the inputs to a prediction algorithm\, and (2) our chances of future success\, which are the desired outputs from the ideal risk prediction algorithm\, are products of our interactions with the real world. But the real world is systematically inequitable. How\, and when\, can we hope to approximate probabilities not in this world\, but in a better world\, one for which\, unfortunately\, we have no data at all? Surprisingly\, this novel question is inextricably bound with the very existence of nondeterminism. \n\n\nProfessor Cynthia Dwork is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences\, Affiliated Faculty at Harvard Law School\, and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft. She uses theoretical computer science to place societal problems on a firm mathematical foundation. \nHer recent awards and honors include the 2020 ACM SIGACT and IEEE TCMF Knuth Prize\, the 2020 IEEE Hamming Medal\, and the 2017 Gödel Prize. \n\n\n\n\nTalk Chair: Horng-Tzer Yau (Harvard Mathematics & CMSA)\n\nModerator: Faidra Monachou (Harvard CMSA)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 2020-2022 Ding Shum lectures were postponed due to Covid-19. \n\n\n\nThe 2019 Ding Shum Lecture featured Ronald Rivest on “Election Security.”\n\n\nThis event is made possible by the generous funding of Ding Lei and Harry Shum. \n\n\nWatch the Lecture on Youtube: URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/2023-ding-shum-lecture/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Ding Shum Lecture,Event,Special Lectures ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Cynthia-Dwork.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230202T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230202T200000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230705T050204Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250328T200143Z UID:10000062-1675364400-1675368000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Third Annual Yip Lecture DESCRIPTION:Andrew Strominger will give the Third Annual Yip Lecture on February 2\, 2023. \nTime: 7:00-8:00 pm ET \nLocation: Harvard Science Center Hall A \n  \nTitle: Black Holes: The Most Mysterious Objects in the Universe \nAbstract: In the last decade black holes have come to center stage in both theoretical and observational science. Theoretically\, they were shown a half-century ago by Stephen Hawking and others to obey a precise but still-mysterious set of laws which imply they are paradoxically both the simplest and most complex objects in the universe. Compelling progress on this paradox has occurred recently. Observationally\, they have finally and dramatically been seen in the sky\, including at LIGO and the Event Horizon Telescope. Future prospects for progress on both fronts hinge on emergent symmetries occurring near the black holes. An elementary presentation of aspects of these topics and their interplay will be given. \nAndrew Strominger is the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics and a senior faculty member at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. \nIntroduction: Peter Galison (Harvard Physics & Black Hole Initiative) \nModerator: Daniel Kapec (Harvard CMSA) \nThe Yip Lecture takes place thanks to the support of Dr. Shing-Yiu Yip. \n  \n \n\nThe previous Yip Lecture featured Avi Loeb (Harvard)\, who spoke on Extraterrestrial Life. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/yip-2023/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event,Public Lecture,Special Lectures,Yip Lecture Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Yip-2023.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221207T153000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221207T163000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230807T165823Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240110T091938Z UID:10001187-1670427000-1670430600@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Fourier quasicrystals and stable polynomials DESCRIPTION:Probability Seminar \nNote location change: Science Center Room 300H \nSpeaker: Lior Alon (MIT) \nTitle: Fourier quasicrystals and stable polynomials \nAbstract: The Poisson summation formula says that the countable sum of exp(int)\, over all integers n\, vanishes as long as t is not an integer multiple of 2 pi. Can we find a non-periodic discrete set A\, such that the sum of exp(iat)\, over a in A\, vanishes for all t outside of a discrete set? The surprising answer is yes. Yves Meyer called the atomic measure supported on such a set a crystalline measure. Crystalline measures provide another surprising connection between physics (quasicrystals) and number theory (the zeros of the Zeta and L functions under GRH). A recent work of Pavel Kurasov and Peter Sarnak provided a construction of crystalline measures with ‘good’ convergence (Fourier quasicrystals) using stable polynomials\, a family of multivariate polynomials that were previously used in proving the Lee-Yang circle theorem and the Kadison-Singer conjecture. After providing the needed background\, I will discuss a recent work in progress with Cynthia Vinzant on the classification of these Kurasov-Sarnak measures and their supporting sets. We prove that these sets have well-defined gap distributions. We show that each Kurasov-Sarnak measure decomposes according to the irreducible decomposition of its associated polynomial\, and the measures associated with each irreducible factor is either supported on an arithmetic progression\, or its support has a bounded intersection with any arithmetic progression. Finally\, we construct random Kurasov-Sarnak measures with gap distribution as close as we want to the eigenvalues spacing of a random unitary matrix. \nBased on joint work with Pravesh Kothari. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/probability-12722/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Probability Seminar ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CMSA-Probability-Seminar-12.07.22.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221130T150000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221130T160000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230807T165526Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240110T091213Z UID:10001186-1669820400-1669824000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Lipschitz properties of transport maps under a log-Lipschitz condition DESCRIPTION:Probability Seminar \n\nLocation: Room 109\, Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge MA 02138\nSpeaker: Dan Mikulincer (MIT) \n\n\nTitle: Lipschitz properties of transport maps under a log-Lipschitz condition \nAbstract: Consider the problem of realizing a target probability measure as a push forward\, by a transport map\, of a given source measure. Typically one thinks about the target measure as being ‘complicated’ while the source is simpler and often more structured. In such a setting\, for applications\, it is desirable to find Lipschitz transport maps which afford the transfer of analytic properties from the source to the target. The talk will focus on Lipschitz regularity when the target measure satisfies a log-Lipschitz condition. \nI will present a construction of a transport map\, constructed infinitesimally along the Langevin flow\, and explain how to analyze its Lipschitz constant. The analysis of this map leads to several new results which apply both to Euclidean spaces and manifolds\, and which\, at the moment\, seem to be out of reach of the classically studied optimal transport theory. \nJoint work with Max Fathi and Yair Shenfeld. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/probability-113022/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Probability Seminar ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/CMSA-Probability-Seminar-11.30.22.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220923T043000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220923T180000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230705T045048Z LAST-MODIFIED:20231226T164613Z UID:10000059-1663907400-1663956000@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:CMSA/MATH Fall Gathering DESCRIPTION:CMSA/MATH Fall Gathering \nFriday\, Sep 23\, 2022\n4:30–6:00 pm\n\nAll CMSA and Math affiliates are invited. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/fall_2022/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220730T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220801T134500 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230705T041718Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250305T170940Z UID:10000056-1659171600-1659361500@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Advances in Mathematical Physics DESCRIPTION:A Conference in Honor of Elliott H. Lieb on his 90th Birthday\nOn July 30 – Aug 1\, 2022 the Harvard Mathematics Department and the CMSA co-hosted a birthday conference in honor of Elliott Lieb. \nThis meeting highlights Elliott’s vast contribution to math and physics. Additionally\, this meeting features Prof. Lieb’s more recent impact in strong subadditivity of entropy and integrable systems (ice model\, Temperley-Lieb algebra etc.). \nVenue:\nJuly 30–31\, 2022: Hall B\, Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\nAugust 1\, 2022: Hall C\, Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 \nSchedule (pdf) \nOrganizers:\nMichael Aizenman\, Princeton University\nJoel Lebowitz\, Rutgers University\nRuedi Seiler\, Technische Universität Berlin\nHerbert Spohn\, Technical University of Munich\nHorng-Tzer Yau\, Harvard University\nShing-Tung Yau\, Harvard University\nJakob Yngvason\, University of Vienna \nSPEAKERS:\nRafael Benguria\, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile\nEric Carlen\, Rutgers University\nPhilippe Di Francesco\, University of Illinois\nHugo Duminil-Copin\, IHES\nLászló Erdös\, Institute of Science and Technology Austria\nRupert Frank\, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich\nJürg Fröhlich\, ETH Zurich\nAlessandro Giuliani\, Università degli Studi Roma Tre\nBertrand Halperin\, Harvard University\nKlaus Hepp\, Institute for Theoretical Physics\, ETH Zurich\nSabine Jansen\, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich\nMathieu Lewin\, Université Paris-Dauphine\nBruno Nachtergaele\, The University of California\, Davis\nYoshiko Ogata\, University of Tokyo\nRon Peled\, Tel Aviv University\nBenjamin Schlein\, University of Zurich\nRobert Seiringer\, Institute of Science and Technology Austria\nJan Philip Solovej\, University of Copenhagen\nHal Tasaki\, Gakushuin University\nSimone Warzel\, Technical University of Munich\nJun Yin\, The University of California\, Los Angeles \n  URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/advances-in-mathematical-physics/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Conference,Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Elliott-Lieb-conference-2022_banner-2-1536x734-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220404T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220404T200000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230705T082949Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250328T200243Z UID:10000085-1649098800-1649102400@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Second Annual Yip Lecture: Extraterrestrial Life DESCRIPTION:Harvard CMSA hosted the second annual Yip Lecture on April 4\, 2022. \nThe Yip Lecture takes place thanks to the support of Dr. Shing-Yiu Yip.\nThis year’s speaker was Avi Loeb (Harvard). \n  \n \nExtraterrestrial Life\nAbstract: Are we alone? It would be arrogant to think that we are\, given that a quarter of all stars host a habitable Earth-size planet. Upcoming searches will aim to detect markers of life in the atmospheres of planets outside the Solar System. We also have unprecedented technologies to detect signs of intelligent civilizations through industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres\, space archaeology of debris from dead civilizations or artifacts such as photovoltaic cells that are used to re-distribute light and heat on the surface of a planet or giant megastructures. Our own civilization is starting to explore interstellar travel. Essential information may also arrive as a “message in a bottle”\, implying that we should examine carefully any unusual object that arrives to our vicinity from outside the Solar System\, such as `Oumuamua. \n\nAbraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird\, Jr.\, Professor of Science at Harvard University and a bestselling author (in lists of the New York Times\, Wall Street Journal\, Publishers Weekly\, Die Zeit\, Der Spiegel\, L’Express and more). He received a PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel at age 24 (1980–1986)\, led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative (1983–1988)\, and was subsequently a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1988–1993). Loeb has written 8 books\, including most recently\, Extraterrestrial (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt\, 2021)\, and nearly a thousand papers (with an h-index of 118) on a wide range of topics\, including black holes\, the first stars\, the search for extraterrestrial life\, and the future of the Universe. Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project in search for extraterrestrial intelligence\, the Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (2007–present) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics\, and also serves as the Head of the Galileo Project (2021–present). He had been the longest serving Chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy (2011–2020) and the Founding Director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (2016–2021). He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences\, the American Physical Society\, and the International Academy of Astronautics. Loeb is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) at the White House\, a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies (2018–2021) and a current member of the Advisory Board for “Einstein: Visualize the Impossible” of the Hebrew University. He also chairs the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative (2016–present) and serves as the Science Theory Director for all Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. In 2012\, TIME magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space and in 2020 Loeb was selected among the 14 most inspiring Israelis of the last decade. \nClick here for Loeb’s commentaries on innovation and diversity. \nWebsite: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/ \nSee the Harvard Gazette article featuring Avi Loeb: “Oh\, if I could talk to the aliens” published March 8\, 2022. \nProf. Loeb’s books:\nExtraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (2021)\nLife in the Cosmos: From Biosignatures to Technosignatures (2021) \nAvil Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project at Harvard. \n\nThe previous Yip Lecture featured Peter Galison (Harvard)\, who spoke on the EHT’s hunt for an objective image of a black hole. URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/second-annual-yip-lecture/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Event,Public Lecture,Special Lectures,Yip Lecture Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Yip2022_poster_web.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190502T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190505T170000 DTSTAMP:20260430T203711 CREATED:20230715T175235Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250328T145104Z UID:10000115-1556787600-1557075600@cmsa.fas.harvard.edu SUMMARY:Conference on Differential Geometry\, Calabi-Yau theory and General Relativity: A conference in honor of the 70th Birthday of Shing-Tung Yau DESCRIPTION:On May 2-5\, 2019 the Harvard Mathematics Department hosted a Conference on Differential Geometry\, Calabi-Yau Theory and General Relativity: A conference in honor of the 70th Birthday of Shing-Tung Yau. The conference was held in the  Science Center\, Lecture Hall C.  \nOrganizers:\n\nHorng-Tzer Yau (Harvard)\nWilfried Schmid (Harvard)\nClifford Taubes (Harvard)\nCumrun Vafa (Harvard)\n\nSpeakers:\n\nLydia Bieri\, University of Michigan\nTristan Collins\, MIT\nSimon Donaldson\, Imperial College\nFan Chung Graham\, UC San Diego\nNigel Hitchin\, Oxford University\nJun Li\, Stanford University\nKefeng Liu\, UCLA\nChiu-Chu Melissa Liu\, Columbia University\nAlina Marian\, Northeastern University\nXenia de la Ossa\, Oxford University\nDuong H. Phong\, Columbia University\nRichard Schoen\, UC Irvine\nAndrew Strominger\, Harvard University\nNike Sun\, MIT\nClifford Taubes\, Harvard University\nChuu-Lian Terng\, UC Irvine\nValentino Tosatti\, Northwestern University\nKaren Uhlenbeck\, University of Texas\nCumrun Vafa\, Harvard University\nMu Tao Wang\, Columbia University\nEdward Witten\, IAS\nStephen Yau\, Tsinghua University\, P.R. China URL:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/conference-on-differential-geometry-calabi-yau-theory-and-general-relativity-a-conference-in-honor-of-the-70th-birthday-of-shing-tung-yau/ LOCATION:Harvard Science Center\, 1 Oxford Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138 CATEGORIES:Conference,Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/media/Yau-2-2-791x1024-2.png END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR