Most of the talk will be about the Farrell-Jones conjecture from the point of view of an outsider. I'll try to explain what the conjecture is about, why one wants to know it, and how to prove it in some cases. The motivation for the talk is my recent work with Fujiwara and Wigglesworth where we prove this conjecture for (virtually torsion-free hyperbolic)-by-cyclic groups. If there is time I will outline the proof of this result.
We consider a reaction-diffusion equation of the type ∂tψ=∂2xψ+V(ψ)+λσ(ψ)W˙on (0,∞)×?, subject to a "nice" initial value and periodic boundary, where ?=[−1,1] and W˙ denotes space-time white noise. The reaction term V:ℝ→ℝ belongs to a large family of functions that includes Fisher--KPP nonlinearities [V(x)=x(1−x)] as well as Allen-Cahn potentials [V(x)=x(1−x)(1+x)], the multiplicative nonlinearity σ:ℝ→ℝ is non random and Lipschitz continuous, and λ>0 is a non-random number that measures the strength of the effect of the noise W˙. The principal finding of this paper is that: (i) When λ is sufficiently large, the above equation has a unique invariant measure; and (ii) When λ is sufficiently small, the collection of all invariant measures is a non-trivial line segment, in particular infinite. This proves an earlier prediction of Zimmerman et al. (2000). Our methods also say a great deal about the structure of these invariant measures.
This is based on joint work with Carl Mueller (Univ. Rochester) and Kunwoo Kim (POSTECH, S. Korea).
The relationship between the large-scale geometry of a group and its algebraic structure can be studied via three notions: a group's quasi-isometry class, a group's abstract commensurability class, and geometric actions on proper geodesic metric spaces. A common model geometry for groups G and G' is a proper geodesic metric space on which G and G' act geometrically. A group G is action rigid if every group G' that has a common model geometry with G is abstractly commensurable to G. For example, a closed hyperbolic n-manifold group is not action rigid for all n at least three. In contrast, we show that free products of closed hyperbolic manifold groups are action rigid. Consequently, we obtain the first examples of Gromov hyperbolic groups that are quasi-isometric but do not virtually have a common model geometry. This is joint work with Daniel Woodhouse.
We will explore connections between the structure of high-dimensional convex polytopes and information acquisition for compressible signals. A classical result in the field of convex polytopes is that if N points are distributed Gaussian iid at random in dimension n<<N, then only order (log N)^n of the points are vertices of their convex hull. Recent results show that provided n grows slowly with N, then with high probability all of the points are vertices of its convex hull. More surprisingly, a rich "neighborliness" structure emerges in the faces of the convex hull. One implication of this phenomenon is that an N-vector with k non-zeros can be recovered computationally efficiently from only n random projections with n=2e k log(N/n). Alternatively, the best k-term approximation of a signal in any basis can be recovered from 2e k log(N/n) non-adaptive measurements, which is within a log factor of the optimal rate achievable for adaptive sampling. Additional implications for randomized error correcting codes will be presented.
This work was joint with David L. Donoho.