Past Colloquia

This will be an expository lecture intended for a general mathematical audience to illustrate, through examples, the theme of $p$-adic variation in the classical theory of modular forms.  Classically, modular forms are complex analytic objects, but because their Fourier coefficients are typically integral, it is possible to also do elementary arithmetic with them.   Early examples arose already in the work of Ramanujan.  Today one knows that modular forms encode deep arithmetic information about elliptic curves and Galois representations.  Our main goal will be to illustrate these ideas through simple concrete examples.   

In this talk we will provide an overview of a number of mathematical models of cancer growth and development - gene regulatory networks, the immune response to cancer, avascular solid tumour growth, tumour-induced angiogenesis, cancer invasion and metastasis. In the talk we will also discuss (the art of) mathematical modelling itself giving illustrations and analogies from works of art. 

The "curse of dimensionality" refers to the host of difficulties that occur when we attempt to extend our intuition about what happens in low dimensions (i.e. when there are only a few features or variables)  to very high dimensions (when there are hundreds or thousands of features, such as in genomics or imaging).  With very high-dimensional data, there is often an intuition that although the data is nominally very high dimensional, it is typically concentrated around a much lower dimensional, although non-linear set. There are many approaches to identifying and representing these subsets.  We will discuss topological approaches, which represent non-linear sets with graphs and simplicial complexes, and permit the "measuring of the shape of the data" as a tool for identifying useful lower dimensional representations.

The goal of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is to design cryptosystems which are secure against classical and quantum adversaries. A topic of fundamental research for decades, the status of PQC drastically changed with the NIST PQC standardization process. Recently there have been AI attacks on some of the proposed systems to PQC. In this talk, we will give an overview of the progress of quantum computing and how it will affect the security landscape. 

Group-based cryptography is a relatively new family in post-quantum cryptography, with high potential. I will give a general survey of the status of post-quantum group-based cryptography and present some recent results.

In the second part of my talk, I speak about Post-quantum hash functions using special linear groups with implication to post-quantum blockchain technologies.

The response of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to a changing climate is one of the largest sources of uncertainty in future sea level predictions.  The behaviour of the subglacial environment, where ice meets hard rock or soft sediment, is a key determinant in the flux of ice towards the ocean, and hence the loss of ice over time.  Predicting how ice sheets respond on a range of timescales brings together mathematical models of the elastic and viscous response of the ice, subglacial sediment and water and is a rich playground where the simplified models of the contact between ice, rock and ocean can shed light on very large scale questions.  In this talk we’ll see how these simplified models can make sense of a variety of field and laboratory data in order to understand the dynamical phenomena controlling the transient response of large ice sheets.

 

The goal of this talk is to give you a glimpse of the Langlands program, a central topic at the intersection of algebraic number theory, algebraic geometry and representation theory. I will focus on a celebrated instance of the Langlands correspondence, namely the modularity of elliptic curves. In the first part of the talk, I will give an explicit example, discuss the different meanings of modularity for rational elliptic curves, and mention applications. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss what is known about the modularity of elliptic curves over more general number fields.

In recent years, methods and concepts of algebraic geometry, particularly those of real and computational algebraic geometry, have been used in many applied domains. In this talk, aimed at a broad audience, I will review applications to molecular biology. The goal is to analyze standard models in systems biology to predict dynamic behavior in regions of parameter space without the need for simulations. I will also mention some challenges in the field of real algebraic geometry that arise from these applications.

Tensor decomposition is an unsupervised learning methodology that has applications in a wide variety of domains, including chemometrics, criminology, and neuroscience. We focus on low-rank tensor decomposition using  canonical polyadic or CANDECOMP/PARAFAC format. A low-rank tensor decomposition is the minimizer according to some nonlinear program. The usual objective function is the sum of squares error (SSE) comparing the data tensor and the low-rank model tensor. This leads to a nicely-structured problem with subproblems that are linear least squares problems which can be solved efficiently in closed form. However, the SSE metric is not always ideal. Thus, we consider using other objective functions. For instance, KL divergence is an alternative metric is useful for count data and results in a nonnegative factorization. In the context of nonnegative matrix factorization, for instance, KL divergence was popularized by Lee and Seung (1999). We can also consider various objectives such as logistic odds for binary data, beta-divergence for nonnegative data, and so on. We show the benefits of alternative objective functions on real-world data sets. We consider the computational of generalized tensor decomposition based on other objective functions, summarize the work that has been done thus far, and illuminate open problems and challenges. This talk includes joint work with David Hong and Jed Duersch.

Let $V$ be a finite dimensional vector space over the field with two elements with a given nondegenerate symplectic form. Let $[V]$ be the vector space of complex valued functions on $V$ and let $[V]_{\mathbb Z}$ be the subgroup of $[V]$ consisting of integer valued functions. We show that there exists a Z-basis of $[V]_{\mathbb Z}$ consisting of characteristic functions of certain explicit isotropic subspaces of $V$ such that the matrix of the Fourier transform from $[V]$ to $[V]$ with respect to this basis is triangular. This continues the tradition started by Hermite who described eigenvectors for the Fourier transform over real numbers.

What is curiosity? Is it an emotion? A behavior? A cognitive process? Curiosity seems to be an abstract concept—like love, perhaps, or justice—far from the realm of those bits of nature that mathematics can possibly address. However, contrary to intuition, it turns out that the leading theories of curiosity are surprisingly amenable to formalization in the mathematics of network science. In this talk, I will unpack some of those theories, and show how they can be formalized in the mathematics of networks. Then, I will describe relevant data from human behavior and linguistic corpora, and ask which theories that data supports. Throughout, I will make a case for the position that individual and collective curiosity are both network building processes, providing a connective counterpoint to the common acquisitional account of curiosity in humans.

The basic question in prime number theory is to try to understand the number of primes in some interesting set of integers. Unfortunately many of the most basic and natural examples are famous open problems which are over 100 years old!

We aim to give an accessible survey of (a selection of) the main results and techniques in prime number theory. In particular we highlight progress on some of these famous problems, as well as a selection of our favourite problems for future progress.

The strong cosmic censorship conjecture is a fundamental open problem in classical general relativity, first put forth by Roger Penrose in the early 70s. This is essentially the question of whether general relativity is a deterministic theory. Perhaps the most exciting arena where the validity of the conjecture is challenged is the interior of rotating black holes, and there has been a lot of work in the past 50 years in identifying mechanisms ensuring that at least some formulation of the conjecture be true. It turns out that when a nonzero cosmological constant Λ is added to the Einstein equations, these underlying mechanisms change in an unexpected way, and the validity of the conjecture depends on a detailed understanding of subtle aspects of black hole scattering theory, surprisingly involving, in the case of negative Λ, some number theory. Does strong cosmic censorship survive the challenge of non-zero Λ? This talk will try to address this Question!

Arguably some of the most interesting phenomena in fluid dynamics, both from a mathematical and a physical perspective, stem from the interplay between a fluid and its boundaries. This talk will present some examples of how boundary effects lead to remarkable outcomes.  Singularities can form in finite time as a consequence of the continuum assumption when material surfaces are in smooth contact with horizontal boundaries of a fluid under gravity. For fluids with chemical solutes, the presence of boundaries impermeable to diffusion adds further dynamics which can give rise to self-induced flows and the formation of coherent structures out of scattered assemblies of immersed bodies. These effects can be analytically and numerically predicted by simple mathematical models and observed in “simple” experimental setups. 

I will report on my most recent results  with Jeremie Szeftel and Elena Giorgi which conclude the proof of the nonlinear, unconditional, stability of slowly rotating Kerr metrics. The main part of the proof, announced last year, was conditional on results concerning boundedness and decay estimates for nonlinear wave equations. I will review the old results and discuss how the conditional results can now be fully established.