Past

The synthesis of complex-shaped colloids and nanoparticles has recently undergone unprecedented advancements. It is now possible to manufacture particles shaped as dumbbells, cubes, stars, triangles, and cylinders, with exquisite control over the particle shape. How can particle geometry be exploited in the context of capillarity and surface-tension phenomena? This talk examines this question by exploring the case of complex-shaped particles adsorbed at the interface between two immiscible fluids, in the small Bond number limit in which gravity is not important. In this limit, the "Cheerio's effect" is unimportant, but interface deformations do emerge. This drives configuration dependent capillary forces that can be exploited in a variety of contexts, from emulsion stabilisation to the manufacturing of new materials. It is an opportunity for the mathematics community to get involved in this field, which offers ample opportunities for careful mathematical analysis. For instance, we find that the mathematical toolbox provided by 2D potential theory lead to remarkably good predictions of the forces and torques measured experimentally by tracking particle pairs of cylinders and ellipsoids. New research directions will also be mentioned during the talk, including elasto-capillary interactions and the simulation of multiphase composites.

For the last few years Soundararajan and I have been developing an alternative "pretentious" approach to analytic number theory. Recently Harper established a more intuitive proof of Halasz's Theorem, the key result in the area, which has allowed the three of us to provide new (and somewhat simpler) proofs to several difficult theorems (like Linnik's Theorem), as well as to suggest some new directions. We shall review these developments in this talk.

This talk will be a brief introduction to some standard conjectures surrounding motivic L-functions, which might be viewed as the arithmetic motivation for Langlands reciprocity.

I will discuss the well-posedness of a new nonlinear model for nematic

elastomers. The main novelty is that the Frank energy penalizes

spatial variations of the nematic director in the deformed, rather

than in the reference configuration, as it is natural in the case of

large deformations.

Riley and Dison's hydra groups are a family of group and subgroup pairs $(G_k, H_k)$ for which the subgroup $H_k$ has distortion like the $k$-th Ackermann function. One wants to know if finite quotients can distinguish elements that are not in $H_k$, as a positive answer would allow you to construct a hands-on family of finitely presented, residually finite groups with arbitrarily large Dehn functions. I'll explain why we get a negative answer.

Gromov and Piatetski-Shapiro proved the existence of finite volume non-arithmetic hyperbolic manifolds of any given dimension. In dimension four and higher, we show that there are about $v^v$ such manifolds of volume at most $v$, considered up to commensurability. Since the number of arithmetic ones tends to be polynomial, almost all hyperbolic manifolds are non-arithmetic in an appropriate sense. Moreover, by restricting attention to non-compact manifolds, our result implies the same growth type for the number of quasi- isometry classes of lattices in $SO(n,1)$. Our method involves a geometric graph-of-spaces construction that relies on arithmetic properties of certain quadratic forms.

A joint work with Arie Levit.

We will give an idea of derived algebraic geometry and sketch a number of more or less recent directions, including derived symplectic geometry, derived Poisson structures, quantizations of moduli spaces, derived analytic geometry, derived logarithmic geometry and derived quadratic structures.

Abstract: We propose a term structure power price model that, in contrast to widely accepted no-arbitrage based approaches, accounts for the non-storable nature of power. It belongs to a class of equilibrium game theoretic models with players divided into producers and consumers. Consumers' goal is to maximize a mean-variance utility function subject to satisfying inelastic demand of their own clients (e.g households, businesses etc.) to whom they sell the power on. Producers, who own a portfolio of power plants each defined by a running fuel (e.g. gas, coal, oil...) and physical characteristics (e.g. efficiency, capacity, ramp up/down times, startup costs...), would, similarly, like to maximize a mean-variance utility function consisting of power, fuel, and emission prices subject to production constraints. Our goal is to determine the term structure of the power price at which production matches consumption. In this talk we outline that such a price exists and develop conditions under which it is also unique. Under condition of existence, we propose a tractable quadratic programming formulation for finding the equilibrium term structure of the power price. Numerical results show performance of the algorithm when modeling the whole system of UK power plants.

We consider the market for a risky asset for which agents have interdependent private valuations. We study competitive rational expectations equilibria under the standard CARA-normal assumptions. Equilibrium is partially revealing even though there are no noise traders. Complementarities in information acquisition arise naturally in this setting. We characterize stable equilibria with endogenous information acquisition. Our framework encompasses the classical REE models in the CARA-normal tradition.

Inexact hardware trades reduced numerical precision against a reduction

in computational cost. A reduction of computational cost would allow

weather and climate simulations at higher resolution. In the first part

of this talk, I will introduce the concept of inexact hardware and

provide results that show the great potential for the use of inexact

hardware in weather and climate simulations. In the second part of this

talk, I will discuss how rounding errors can be assessed if the forecast

uncertainty and the chaotic behaviour of the atmosphere is acknowledged.

In the last part, I will argue that rounding errors do not necessarily

degrade numerical models, they can actually be beneficial. This

conclusion will be based on simulations with a model of the

one-dimensional Burgers' equation.

Biharmonic maps are the solutions of a variational problem for maps

between Riemannian manifolds. But since the underlying functional

contains nonlinear differential operators that behave badly on the usual

Sobolev spaces, it is difficult to study it with variational methods. If

the target manifold has enough symmetry, however, then we can combine

analytic tools with geometric observations and make some statements

about existence and regularity.

Pancakes.

Abstract: We introduce a new framework for defining integration against rough path. This framework generalizes rough integral, and gives a natural explanation of some of the regularity requirements in rough path theory.

The filtration on the infinite symmetric product of spheres by number of

factors provides a sequence of spectra between the sphere spectrum and

the integral Eilenberg-Mac Lane spectrum. This filtration has received a

lot of attention and the subquotients are interesting stable homotopy

types.

In this talk I will discuss the equivariant stable homotopy types, for

finite groups, obtained from this filtration for the infinite symmetric

product of representation spheres. The filtration is more complicated

than in the non-equivariant case, and already on the zeroth homotopy

groups an interesting filtration of the augmentation ideal of the Burnside

rings arises. Our method is by `global' homotopy theory, i.e., we study

the simultaneous behaviour for all finite groups at once. In this context,

the equivariant subquotients are no longer rationally trivial, nor even

concentrated in dimension 0.

When $\partial D$ is spatially homogeneous, we show that we can recover the lower and upper Minkowski dimensions of $\partial D$ from the sort time behaviour of $E(s)$. Furthermore, when the Minkowski dimension exists, finer geometric fluctuations can be recovered and $E(s)$ is controlled by $s^\alpha e^{f(\log(1/s))}$ for small $s$, for some $\alpha \in (0, \infty)$ and some regularly varying function $f$. The function $f$ is not constant is general and carries some geometric information.

When $\partial D$ is statistically self-similar, the Minkowski dimension and content of $\partial D$ typically exist and can be recovered from $E(s)$. Furthermore, $E(s)$ has an almost sure expansion $E(s) = c s^{\alpha} N_\infty + o(s^\alpha)$ for small $s$, for some $c$ and $\alpha \in (0, \infty)$ and some positive random variable $N_\infty$ with unit expectation arising as the limit of some martingale. In some cases, we can show that the fluctuations around this almost sure behaviour are governed by a central limit theorem, and conjecture that this is true more generally.

This is based on joint work with David Croydon and Ben Hambly.

We are dwelling in the Big Data age. The diversity of the uses

of Big Data unleashes limitless possibilities. Many people are talking

about ways to use Big Data to track the collective human behaviours,

monitor electoral popularity, and predict financial fluctuations in

stock markets, etc. Big Data reveals both challenges and opportunities,

which are not only related to technology but also to human itself. This

talk will cover various current topics and trends in Big Data research.

The speaker will share his relevant experiences on how to use analytics

tools to obtain key metrics on online social networks, as well as

present the challenges of Big Data analytics.

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Bio: Ning Wang (Ph.D) works as Researcher at the Oxford Internet

Institute. His research is driven by a deep interest in analysing a wide

range of sociotechnical problems by exploiting Big Data approaches, with

the hope that this work could contribute to the intersection of social

behavior and computational systems.

We consider a large class of three dimensional continuous dynamic fluctuation models, and show that they all rescale and converge to the stochastic Allen-Cahn equation, whose solution should be interpreted after a suitable renormalization procedure. The interesting feature is that, the coefficient of the limiting equation is different from one's naive guess, and the renormalization required to get the correct limit is also different from what one would naturally expect. I will also briefly explain how the recent theory of regularity structures enables one to prove such results. Joint work with Martin Hairer.