Past

In this talk I will give an overview of the algorithms used by Chebfun to numerically compute polynomial and trigonometric minimax approximations of continuous functions. I'll also present Chebfun's capabilities to compute best approximations on compact subsets of an interval and how these methods can be used to design digital filters.

The study of infrared singularities, due to the emission of “soft” (low momentum) gauge bosons, remains a highly active research area in a variety of quantum field theories. After motivating both phenomenological and formal reasons as to why we should care about IR singularities, this talk will review their structure in QED, QCD and quantum gravity, examining the similarities and differences between these three contexts. The role of Wilson lines will be examined, which provide a useful unifying language. Finally, I will examine recent work on moving beyond the soft approximation, and why this might be useful.

This'll be a nice and slow paced introduction to topological quantum field theory in general, and 1-2-3 dimensional theories in particular. If time permits I will explain the spin version of these and their connection to physics. There will be lots of pictures. 

I will introduce the general idea of p-adic Hodge theory from the view point of a beginner. Also, I will give a sketch of the proof of the crystalline comparison theorem in the case of good reduction using 'almost mathematics'.

I will discuss some properties of Hermitian metrics on compact complex manifolds, having constant Chern scalar curvature, focusing on the existence problem in fixed Hermitian conformal classes (the "Chern-Yamabe problem"). This is joint work with Daniele Angella and Simone Calamai.

In this talk, gauged quiver quantum mechanics will be analysed for BPS state counting. Despite the wall-crossing phenomenon of those countings, an invariant quantity of quiver itself, dubbed quiver invariant, will be carefully defined for a certain class of abelian quiver theories. After that, to get a handle on nonabelian theories, I will overview the abelianisation and the mutation methods, and will illustrate some of their interesting features through a couple of simple examples.

A recommendation system for multi-modal journey planning could be useful to travellers in making their journeys more efficient and pleasant, and to transport operators in encouraging travellers to make more effective use of infrastructure capacity.

Journeys will have multiple quantifiable attributes (e.g. time, cost, likelihood of getting a seat) and other attributes that we might infer indirectly (e.g. a pleasant view).  Individual travellers will have different preferences that will affect the most appropriate recommendations.  The recommendation system might build profiles for travellers, quantifying their preferences.  These could be inferred indirectly, based on the information they provide, choices they make and feedback they give.  These profiles might then be used to compare and rank different travel options.

I will explain the framework of quasiminimal structures and quasiminimal classes, and give some basic examples and open questions. Then I will explain some joint work with Martin Bays in which we have constructed variants of the pseudo-exponential fields (originally due to Boris Zilber) which are quasimininal and discuss progress towards the problem of showing that complex exponentiation is quasiminimal. I will also discuss some joint work with Adam Harris in which we try to build a pseudo-j-function.

I plan to discuss finite time singularities for the harmonic map heat flow and describe a beautiful example of winding behaviour due to Peter Topping.

I will discuss joint work with Ana Caraiani, Matthew Emerton and David Savitt, in which we construct moduli stacks of two-dimensional potentially Barsotti-Tate Galois representations, and study the relationship of their geometry to the weight part of Serre's conjecture.

Security Constrained Optimal Power Flow is an increasingly important problem for power systems operation both in its own right and as a subproblem for more complex problems such as transmission switching or
unit commitment.

The structure of the problem resembles stochastic programming problems in that one aims to find a cost optimal operation schedule that is feasible for all possible equipment outage scenarios
(contingencies). Due to the presence of power flow constraints (in their "DC" or "AC" version), the resulting problem is a large scale linear or nonlinear programming problem.

However it is known that only a small subset of the contingencies is active at the solution. We show how Interior Point methods can exploit this structure both by simplifying the linear algebra operations as
well as generating necessary contingencies on the fly and integrating them into the algorithm using IPM warmstarting techniques. The final problem solved by this scheme is significantly smaller than the full
contingency constrained problem, resulting in substantial speed gains.

Numerical and theoretical results of our algorithm will be presented.

Associahedra are polytopes introduced by Stasheff to encode topological semigroups in which associativity holds up to coherent homotopy. These polytopes naturally form a topological operad that gives a resolution of the associative operad. Muro and Tonks recently introduced an operad which encodes $A_\infty$ algebras with homotopy coherent unit. 
The material in this talk will be fairly basic. I will cover operads and their algebras, give the construction of the $A_\infty$ operad using the Boardman-Vogt resolution, and of the unital associahedra introduced by Muro and Tonks.
Depending on time and interest of the audience I will define unital $A_\infty$ differential graded algebras and explain how they are precisely the algebras over the cellular chains of the operad constructed by Muro and Tonks.

Artist Antoni Malinowski has been commissioned to produce a major wall painting in the foyer of the new Mathematical Institute in Oxford, the Andrew Wiles Building. To celebrate and introduce that work Antoni and a series of distinguished speakers will demonstrate the different impacts and perceptions of colour produced by the micro-structure of the pigments, from an explanation of the pigments themselves to an examination of how the brain perceives colour.

Speakers:

Jo Volley, Gary Woodley and Malina Busch, the Pigment Timeline Project, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London

‘Pigment Timeline’

Dr. Ruth Siddall - Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences, University College London

‘Pigments: microstructure and origins?’  

Antoni Malinowski

‘Spectrum Materialised’ 

Prof. Hannah Smithson Associate Professor, Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow, Pembroke College

‘Colour Perception‘

11.30am, Lecture Theatre 1

Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford

Andrew Wiles Building

Radcliffe Observatory Quarter

No booking required

In the classification of surfaces, K3 surfaces hold a place not dissimilar to that of elliptic curves within the classification of curves by genus. In recent years there has been a lot of activity on the problem of rational points on K3 surfaces. I will discuss the problem of finding the Picard group of a K3 surface, and how this relates to finding counterexamples to the Hasse principle on K3 surfaces.

Let X be a smooth projective curve (of genus greater than or equal to 2) over C and M the moduli space of vector bundles over X, of rank 2 and with fixed determinant of degree 1.Then the Fourier-Mukai functor from the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on X to that of M, given by the normalised Poincare bundle, is fully faithful, except (possibly) for hyperelliptic curves of genus 3,4,and 5

 This result is proved by establishing precise vanishing theorems for a family of vector bundles on the moduli space M.

 Results on the deformation  and inversion of Picard bundles (already known) follow from the full faithfulness of the F-M functor

In this talk we will explore the convergence of Krylov methods when used to solve $Lu = f$ where $L$ is an unbounded linear operator.  We will show that for certain problems, methods like Conjugate Gradients and GMRES still converge even though the spectrum of $L$ is unbounded. A theoretical justification for this behavior is given in terms of polynomial approximation on unbounded domains.    

Let $G(n,d)$ be a random $d$-regular graph on $n$ vertices. In 2004 Kim and Vu showed that if $d$ grows faster than $\log n$ as $n$ tends to infinity, then one can define a joint distribution of $G(n,d)$ and two binomial random graphs $G(n,p_1)$ and $G(n,p_2)$ -- both of which have asymptotic expected degree $d$ -- such that with high probability $G(n,d)$ is a supergraph of $G(n,p_1)$ and a subgraph of $G(n,p_2)$. The motivation for such a coupling is to deduce monotone properties (like Hamiltonicity) of $G(n,d)$ from the simpler model $G(n,p)$. We present our work with A. Dudek, A. Frieze and A. Rucinski on the Kim-Vu conjecture and its hypergraph counterpart.

Sparse matrices occur in numerical simulations throughout science and engineering. In particular, it is often desirable to solve systems of the form Ax=b, where A is a sparse matrix with 100,000+ rows and columns. The order that the rows and columns occur in can have a dramatic effect on the viability of a direct solver e.g., the time taken to find x, the amount of memory needed, the quality of x,... We shall consider symmetric matrices and, with the help of playdough, explore how best to order the rows/columns using a nested dissection strategy. Starting with a straightforward strategy, we will discover the pitfalls and develop an adaptive strategy with the aim of coping with a large variety of sparse matrix structures.

Some of the talk will involve the audience playing with playdough, so bring your inner child along with you!

By classical results of Mumford and Donagi, Mori-Mukai, Verra, the moduli spaces A_g of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension g are unirational for g≤5 and are of general type for g≥7. Answering a conjecture of Kanev, we provide a uniformization of A6 by a Hurwitz space parameterizing certain curve covers. Using this uniformization, we study the geometry of A6 and make advances towards determining its birational type. This is a joint work with Donagi-Farkas-Izadi-Ortega.

I prove that if markets are weak-form efficient, meaning current prices fully reflect all information available in past prices, then P = NP, meaning every computational problem whose solution can be verified in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. I also prove the converse by showing how we can "program" the market to solveNP-complete problems. Since P probably does not equal NP, markets are probably not efficient. Specifically, markets become increasingly inefficient as the time series lengthens or becomes more frequent. An illustration by way of partitioning the excess returns to momentum strategies based on data availability confirms this prediction.

For more info please visit: http://philipmaymin.com/academic-papers#pnp

The general problem of shock formation in three space dimensions was solved by Christodoulou in 2007. In his work also a complete description of the maximal development of the initial data is provided. This description sets up the problem of continuing the solution beyond the point where the solution ceases to be regular. This problem is called the shock development problem. It belongs to the category of free boundary problems but in addition has singular initial data because of the behavior of the solution at the blowup surface. In my talk I will present the solution to this problem in the case of spherical symmetry. This is joint work with Demetrios Christodoulou.

Many hard problems in Diophantine geometry have analogues over function fields which are less hard. I will give some examples.

*/ /*-->*/ Let G be a locally compact Hausdorff topological group. Examples are Lie groups, p-adic groups, adelic groups, and discrete groups. The BC (Baum-Connes) conjecture proposes an answer to the problem of calculating the K-theory of the convolution C* algebra of G. Validity of the conjecture has implications in several different areas of mathematics --- e.g. Novikov conjecture, Gromov-Lawson-Rosenberg conjecture, Dirac exhaustion of the discrete series, Kadison-Kaplansky conjecture. An expander is a sequence  of finite graphs which is efficiently connected. Any discrete group which contains an expander as a sub-graph of its Cayley graph is a counter-example to  the BC conjecture with coefficients. Such discrete groups have been constructed by Gromov-Arjantseva-Delzant and by Damian Osajda. This talk will indicate how to make a correction in BC with coefficients. There are no known counter-examples to the corrected conjecture, and all previously known confirming examples remain confirming examples.

We show how to get coarse bounds on the number of (non-simple) closed geodesics on a surface, given upper bounds on both length and self-intersection number. Recent work by Mirzakhani and by Rivin has produced asymptotics for the growth of the number of simple closed curves and curves with one self-intersection (respectively) with respect to length. However, no asymptotics, or even bounds, were previously known for other bounds on self-intersection number. Time permitting, we will discuss some applications of this result

It has been conjectured that the fundamental theory of strings and branes has an $E_{11}$ symmetry. I will explain how this conjecture  leads to  a generalised space-time,  which is automatically equipped with its own geometry, as well as equations of motion for the fields that live on this generalised space-time.

 

Shear Thickening fluids such as cornstarch and water show remarkable response under impact, which allows, for example, a person to run on the surface of the suspension. We perform constant velocity impact experiments along with imaging and particle tracking in a shear thickening fluid at velocities lower than 500 mm/s and suspension heights of a few cm. In this regime, where inertial effects are insignificant, we find that a solid-like dynamically jammed region with a propagating front is generated under impact. The suspension is able to support large stresses like a solid only when the front reaches the opposite boundary. These impact-activated fronts are generated only above a critical velocity. We construct a model by taking into account that sufficiently large stresses are generated when this solid like region spans to the opposite boundary and the work necessary to deform this solid like material dissipates the kinetic energy of the impacting object. The model shows quantitative agreement of the measured penetration depth using high speed video of a person running on cornstarch and water suspensions.

Data in many areas of science and sociology is now routinely represented in the form of networks. A fundamental task often required is to compare two datasets (networks) to assess the level of similarity between them. In the context of biological sciences, networks often represent either direct or indirect molecular interactions and an active research area is to assess the level of conservation of interaction patterns across species.

Currently biological network comparison software largely relies on the concept of alignment where close matches between the nodes of two or more networks are sought. These node matches are based on sequence similarity and/or interaction patterns. However, because of the incomplete and error-prone datasets currently available, such methods have had limited success. Moreover, the results of network alignment are in general not amenable for distance-based evolutionary analysis of sets of networks. In this talk I will describe Netdis, a topology-based distance measure between networks, which offers the possibility of network phylogeny reconstruction.

In a series of recent papers David Masser and Umberto Zannier proved the relative Manin-Mumford conjecture for abelian surfaces, at least when everything is defined over the algebraic numbers. In a further paper with Daniel Bertrand and Anand Pillay they have explained what happens in the semiabelian situation, under the same restriction as above.

At present it is not clear that these results are effective. I'll discuss joint work with Philipp Habegger and Masser and with Harry Schimdt in which we show that certain very special cases can be made effective. For instance, we can effectively compute a bound on the order of a root of unity t such that the point with abscissa 2 is torsion on the Legendre curve with parameter t.

**Note change of room**

We present a dynamic theory for time-inconsistent stopping problems. The theory is developed under the paradigm of expected discounted
payoff, where the process to stop is continuous and Markovian. We introduce equilibrium stopping policies, which are imple-mentable
stopping rules that take into account the change of preferences over time. When the discount function induces decreasing impatience, we
establish a constructive method to find equilibrium policies. A new class of stopping problems, involving equilibrium policies, is
introduced, as opposed to classical optimal stopping. By studying the stopping of a one-dimensional Bessel process under hyperbolic discounting, we illustrate our theory in an explicit manner.

I describe joint work with Alastair Irving in which we improve a result of
D.H.J. Polymath on the length of intervals in $[N,2N]$ that can be shown to
contain $m$ primes. Here $m$ should be thought of as large but fixed, while $N$
tends to infinity.
The Harman sieve is the key to the improvement. The preprint will be
available on the Math ArXiv before the date of the talk.

Can we extend the FEM to general polytopic, i.e. polygonal and polyhedral, meshes while retaining 
the ease of implementation and computational cost comparable to that of standard FEM? Within this talk, I present two approaches that achieve just  that (and much more): the Virtual Element Method (VEM) and an hp-version discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method.

The Virtual Element spaces are like the usual (polynomial) finite element spaces with the addition of suitable non-polynomial functions. This is far from being a novel idea. The novelty of the VEM approach is that it avoids expensive evaluations of the non-polynomial "virtual" functions by basing all 
computations solely on the method's carefully chosen degrees of freedom. This way we can easily deal 
with complicated element geometries and/or higher continuity requirements (like C1, C2, etc.), while 
maintaining the computational complexity comparable to that of standard finite element computations.

As you might expect, the choice and number of the degrees of freedom depends on such continuity 
requirements. If mesh flexibility is the goal, while one is ready to  give up on global regularity, other approaches can be considered. For instance, dG approaches are naturally suited to deal with polytopic meshes. Here I present an extension of the classical Interior Penalty dG method which achieves optimal rates of convergence on polytopic meshes even under elemental edge/face degeneration. 

The next step is to exploit mesh flexibility in the efficient resolution of problems characterised by 
complicated geometries and solution features, for instance within the framework of automatic FEM 
adaptivity. I shall finally introduce ongoing work in this direction.

I will present some recent results concerning the higher gradient integrability of

σ-harmonic functions u with discontinuous coefficients σ, i.e. weak solutions of

div(σ∇u) = 0. When σ is assumed to be symmetric, then the optimal integrability

exponent of the gradient field is known thanks to the work of Astala and Leonetti

& Nesi. I will discuss the case when only the ellipticity is fixed and σ is otherwise

unconstrained and show that the optimal exponent is attained on the class of

two-phase conductivities σ: Ω⊂R27→ {σ1,σ2} ⊂M2×2. The optimal exponent

is established, in the strongest possible way of the existence of so-called

exact solutions, via the exhibition of optimal microgeometries.

(Joint work with V. Nesi and M. Ponsiglione.)

I will report on some joint work with Jacob Tsimerman
concerning multiplicative relations among singular moduli.
Our results rely on the ``Ax-Schanuel'' theorem for the j-function
recently proved by us, which I will describe.

I will discuss various types of filling functions on topological spaces, stating some results in the area. I will then go onto prove that a finitely presented subgroup of a hyperbolic group of cohomological dimension 2 is hyperbolic. On the way I will prove a stronger result about filling functions of subgroups of hyperbolic groups of cohomological dimension $n$.

We review a class of systems of non-linear PDEs, derived from the Cahn--Hilliard and Ohta--Kawasaki functionals, that describe the energy evolution of diblock copolymers. These are long chain molecules that can self assemble into repeating patterns as they cool. We are particularly interested in finite element numerical methods that approximate these PDEs in the two-phase (in which we model the polymer only) and three-phase (in which we imagine the polymer surrounded by, and interacting with, a void) cases.

We present a brief derivation of the underlying models, review a class of numerical methods to approximate them, and showcase some early results from our codes.

The talk will present ongoing work on medical image reconstruction from x-ray scanners. A suitable method for reconstruction of these undersampled systems is compressed sensing. The presentation will show respective reconstruction methods and their analysis. Furthermore, work in progress about extensions of the standard approach will be shown.

[based on joint work with Li Guo and  Bin Zhang]

 We apply to  the study of exponential sums on lattice points in
convex rational polyhedral cones, the generalised algebraic approach of
Connes and Kreimer to  perturbative quantum field theory.  For this purpose
we equip the space of    cones   with a connected coalgebra structure.
The  algebraic Birkhoff factorisation of Connes and Kreimer   adapted  and
generalised to this context then gives rise to a convolution factorisation
of exponential sums on lattice points in cones. We show that this
factorisation coincides with the classical Euler-Maclaurin formula
generalised to convex rational polyhedral cones by Berline and Vergne by
means of  an interpolating holomorphic function.
We define  renormalised conical zeta values at non-positive integers as the
Taylor coefficients at zero of the interpolating holomorphic function.  When
restricted to Chen cones, this  yields yet another way to renormalise
multiple zeta values  at non-positive integers.

We consider the system of nonlinear differential equations
\begin{equation}
(1) \qquad
\begin{cases}
\dot u_n(t) + \lambda^{2n} u_n(t) 
- \lambda^{\beta n} u_{n-1}(t)^2 + \lambda^{\beta(n+1)} u_n(t) u_{n+1}(t) = 0,\\
u_n(0) = a_n, n \in \mathbb{N}, \quad \lambda > 1, \beta > 0.
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
In this talk we explain why this system is a model for the Navier-Stokes equations of hydrodynamics. The natural question is to find a such functional space, where one could prove the existence and the uniqueness of solution. In 2008, A. Cheskidov proved that the system (1) has a unique "strong" solution if $\beta \le 2$, whereas the "strong" solution does not exist if $\beta > 3$. (Note, that the 3D-Navier-Stokes equations correspond to the value $\beta = 5/2$.) We show that for sufficiently "good" initial data the system (1) has a unique Leray-Hopf solution for all $\beta > 0$.