Past

The talk will recall the results of three preprints, first two authored by my former student Mickael Launay, and the final coauthored by Mickael and myself. All three works are available on arXiv. At this point it is not clear that they will ever get published (or submitted for review) but hopefully this does not make their contents less interesting. This class of interacting urn processes was introduced in Launay's thesis, in an attempt to model more realistically the memory sharing that occurs in food trail pheromone marking or in similar collective learning phenomena. An interesting critical behavior occurs already in the case of exponential reinforcement. No prior knowledge of strong urns will be assumed, and I will try to explain the reason behind the phase transition.

The coalescing Brownian flow on $\R$ is a process which was introduced by Arratia (1979) and Toth and Werner (1997), and which formally corresponds to starting coalescing Brownian motions from every space-time point. We provide a new state space and topology for this process and obtain an invariance principle for coalescing random walks. The invariance principle holds under a finite variance assumption and is thus optimal. In a series of previous works, this question was studied under a different topology, and a moment of order $3-\eps$ was necessary for the convergence to hold. Our proof relies crucially on recent work of Schramm and Smirnov on scaling limits of critical percolation in the plane. Our approach is sufficiently simple that we can handle substantially more complicated coalescing flows with little extra work -- in particular similar results are obtained in the case of coalescing Brownian motions on the Sierpinski gasket. This is the first such result where the limiting paths do not enjoy the non-crossing property.

Joint work with Christophe Garban (Lyon) and Arnab Sen (Minnesota).

This is the first of a series of talks based on Gary 
Gruenhage's 'A survey of D-spaces' [1]. A space is D if for every 
neighbourhood assignment we can choose a closed discrete set of points 
whose assigned neighbourhoods cover the space. The mention of 
neighbourhood assignments and a topological notion of smallness (that 
is, of being closed and discrete) is peculiar among covering properties. 
Despite being introduced in the 70's, we still don't know whether a 
Lindelöf or a paracompact space must be D. In this talk, we will examine 
some elementary properties of this class via extent and Lindelöf numbers.

I will explain a new formulation of Einstein’s equations in 4-dimensions using the language of gauge theory. This was also discovered independently, and with advances, by Kirill Krasnov. I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this new point of view over the traditional "Einstein-Hilbert" description of Einstein manifolds. In particular, it leads to natural "sphere conjectures" and also suggests ways to find new Einstein 4-manifolds. I will describe some first steps in these directions. Time permitting, I will explain how this set-up can also be seen via 6-dimensional symplectic topology and the additional benefits that brings.

I will discuss two topics. Firstly, coupling of the circadian clock and cell cycle in mammalian cells. Together with the labs of Franck Delaunay (Nice) and Bert van der Horst (Rotterdam) we have developed a pipeline involving experimental and mathematical tools that enables us to track through time the phase of the circadian clock and cell cycle in the same single cell and to extend this to whole lineages. We show that for mouse fibroblast cell cultures under natural conditions, the clock and cell cycle phase-lock in a 1:1 fashion. We show that certain perturbations knock this coupled system onto another periodic state, phase-locked but with a different winding number. We use this understanding to explain previous results. Thus our study unravels novel phase dynamics of 2 key mammalian biological oscillators. Secondly, I present a radical revision of the Nrf2 signalling system. Stress responsive signalling coordinated by Nrf2 provides an adaptive response for protection against toxic insults, oxidative stress and metabolic dysfunction. We discover that the system is an autonomous oscillator that regulates its target genes in a novel way.

Ax's theorem on the dimension of the intersection of an algebraic subvariety and a formal subgroup (Theorem 1F in "Some topics in differential algebraic geometry I...") implies Schanuel type transcendence results for a vast class of formal maps (including exp on a semi-abelian variety). Ax stated and proved this theorem in the characteristic 0 case, but the statement is meaningful for arbitrary characteristic and still implies positive characteristic transcendence results. I will discuss my work on positive characteristic version of Ax's theorem.

Motivated by the study of PDEs, we introduce the notion of a D-module on a variety X and give the basics of three perspectives on the theory: modules over the sheaf of differential operators on X; quasi-coherent modules with flat connection; and crystals on X. This talk will assume basic knowledge of algebraic geometry (such as rudimentary sheaf theory).

We discuss a simple variational principle for coherent material vortices

in two-dimensional turbulence. Vortex boundaries are sought as closed

stationary curves of the averaged Lagrangian strain. We find that

solutions to this problem are mathematically equivalent to photon spheres

around black holes in cosmology. The fluidic photon spheres satisfy

explicit differential equations whose outermost limit cycles are optimal

Lagrangian vortex boundaries. As an application, we uncover super-coherent

material eddies in the South Atlantic, which yield specific Lagrangian

transport estimates for Agulhas rings. We also describe briefly coherent

Lagrangian vortex detection to three-dimensional flows.

In this talk I will give a definition of cluster algebra and state some main results.

Moreover, I will explain how the combinatorics of certain cluster algebras can be modeled in geometric terms.

The accurate and stable numerical calculation of higher-order

derivatives of holomorphic functions (as required, e.g., in random matrix

theory to extract probabilities from a generating function) turns out to

be a surprisingly rich topic: there are connections to asymptotic analysis,

the theory of entire functions, and to algorithmic graph theory.

\textbf{James Newbury} \newline

Title: Heavy traffic diffusion approximation of the limit order book in a one-sided reduced-form model. \newline

Abstract: Motivated by a zero-intelligence approach, we try to capture the

dynamics of the best bid (or best ask) queue in a heavy traffic setting,

i.e when orders and cancellations are submitted at very high frequency.

We first prove the weak convergence of the discrete-space best bid/ask

queue to a jump-diffusion process. We then identify the limiting process

as a regenerative elastic Brownian motion with drift and random jumps to

the origin.

\newline

\textbf{Zhaoxu Hou} \newline

Title: Robust Framework In Finance: Martingale Optimal Transport and

Robust Hedging For Multiple Marginals In Continuous Time

\newline

Abstract: It is proved by Dolinsky and Soner that there is no duality

gap between the robust hedging of path-dependent European Options and a

martingale optimal problem for one marginal case. Motivated by their

work and Mykland's idea of adding a prediction set of paths (i.e.

super-replication of a contingent claim only required for paths falling

in the prediction set), we try to achieve the same type of duality

result in the setting of multiple marginals and a path constraint.

Working together with the Blue Brain Project at the EPFL, I'm trying to develop new topological methods for neural modelling. As a mathematician, however, I'm really motivated by how these questions in neuroscience can inspire new mathematics. I will introduce new work that I am doing, together with Kathryn Hess and Ran Levi, on brain plasticity and learning processes, and discuss some of the topological and geometric features that are appearing in our investigations.

I will look at the classical constructions that can be made using a straight edge and compass, I will then look at the limits of these constructions. I will then show how much further we can get with Origami, explaining how it is possible to trisect an angle or double a cube. Compasses not supplied.

Thoughts on the Burnside problem

Quasimaps provide compactifications, depending on a stability parameter epsilon, for moduli spaces of maps from nonsingular algebraic curves to a large class of GIT quotients. These compactifications enjoy good properties and in particular they carry virtual fundamental classes. As the parameter epsilon varies, the resulting invariants are related by wall-crossing formulas. I will present some of these formulas in genus zero, and will explain why they can be viewed as generalizations (in several directions) of Givental's toric mirror theorems. I will also describe extensions of wall-crossing to higher genus, and (time permitting) to orbifold GIT targets as well.
The talk is based on joint works with Bumsig Kim, and partly also with Daewoong Cheong and with Davesh Maulik.

Hessians of functionals of PDE solutions have important applications in PDE-constrained optimisation (Newton methods) and uncertainty quantification (for accelerating high-dimensional Bayesian inference).  With current techniques, a typical cost for one Hessian-vector product is 4-11 times the cost of the forward PDE solve: such high costs generally make their use in large-scale computations infeasible, as a Hessian solve or eigendecomposition would have costs of hundreds of PDE solves.

In this talk, we demonstrate that it is possible to exploit the common structure of the adjoint, tangent linear and second-order adjoint equations to greatly accelerate the computation of Hessian-vector products, by trading a large amount of computation for a large amount of storage. In some cases of practical interest, the cost of a Hessian-
vector product is reduced to a small fraction of the forward solve, making it feasible to employ sophisticated algorithms which depend on them.

Perfect matchings are fundamental objects of study in graph theory. There is a substantial classical theory, which cannot be directly generalised to hypergraphs unless P=NP, as it is NP-complete to determine whether a hypergraph has a perfect matching. On the other hand, the generalisation to hypergraphs is well-motivated, as many important problems can be recast in this framework, such as Ryser's conjecture on transversals in latin squares and the Erdos-Hanani conjecture on the existence of designs. We will discuss a characterisation of the perfect matching problem for uniform hypergraphs that satisfy certain density conditions (joint work with Richard Mycroft), and a polynomial time algorithm for determining whether such hypergraphs have a perfect matching (joint work with Fiachra Knox and Richard Mycroft).