Past

The pandemic has had a deleterious influence on the Hollywood film
industry.  Fortunately,  however, the thin film industry continues to
flourish.  A host of effects are responsible for confined liquids
exhibiting properties that differ from their bulk counterparts. For
example, the dominant polarization and surface forces across a layered
system can control the material behavior on length scales vastly larger
than the film thickness.  This basic class of phenomena, wherein
volume-volume interactions create large pressures, are at play in,
amongst many other settings, wetting, biomaterials, ceramics, colloids,
and tribology.  When the films so created involve phase change and are
present in disequilibrium, the forces can be so large that they destroy
the setting that allowed them to form in the first place. I will
describe the connection between such films in a semi-traditional wetting
dynamics geometry and active brownian dynamics.  I then explore their
power to explain a wide range of processes from materials- to astro- to
geo-science.

Point counting on definable sets in non-archimedean settings has many faces. For sets living in Q_p^n, one can count actual rational points of bounded height, but for sets in C((t))^n, one rather "counts" the polynomials in t of bounded degree. What if the latter is of infinite cardinality? We treat three settings, each with completely different behaviour for point counting : 1) the setting of subanalytic sets, where we show finiteness of point counting but growth can be aribitrarily fast with the degree in t ; 2) the setting of Pfaffian sets, which is new in the non-archimedean world and for which we show an analogue of Wilkie's conjecture in all dimensions; 3) the Hensel minimal setting, which is most general and where finiteness starts to fail, even for definable transcendental curves! In this infinite case, one bounds the dimension rather than the (infinite) cardinality. This represents joint work with Binyamini, Novikov, with Halupczok, Rideau, Vermeulen, and separate work by Cantoral-Farfan, Nguyen, Vermeulen.

Since its introduction in 1978 the curve complex has become one of the most important objects to study surfaces and their homeomorphisms. The curve complex is defined only using data about curves and their disjointness: a stunning feature of it is the fact that this information is enough to give it a rigid structure, that is every symplicial automorphism is induced topologically. Ivanov conjectured that this rigidity is a feature of most objects naturally associated to surfaces, if their structure is rich enough.

During the talk we will introduce the curve complex, then we will focus on its rigidity, giving a sketch of the topological constructions behind the proof. At last we will talk about generalisations of the curve complex, and highlight some rigidity results which are clues that Ivanov's Metaconjecture, even if it is more of a philosophical statement than a mathematical one, could be "true".

A uniform spanning tree of $\mathbb{Z}^4$ can be thought of as the "uniform measure" on trees of $\mathbb{Z}^4$. The past of 0 in the uniform spanning tree is the finite component that is disconnected from infinity when 0 is deleted from the tree. We establish the logarithmic corrections to the probabilities that the past contains a path of length $n$, that it has volume at least $n$ and that it reaches the boundary of the box of side length $n$ around 0. Dimension 4 is the upper critical dimension for this model in the sense that in higher dimensions it exhibits "mean-field" critical behaviour. An important part of our proof is the study of the Newtonian capacity of a loop erased random walk in 4 dimensions. This is joint work with Tom Hutchcroft.

We combine the notions of graded Clifford algebras and Drinfeld algebras. This gives us a framework to study algebras with a PBW property and underlying vector space $\mathbb{C}[G] \# Cl(V) \otimes S(U) $ for $G$-modules $U$ and $V$. The class of graded Clifford-Drinfeld algebras contains the Hecke-Clifford algebras defined by Nazarov, Khongsap-Wang. We give a new example of a GCD algebra which plays a role in an Arakawa-Suzuki duality involving the Clifford algebra.

How can a random walker on a network be helpful for patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)? Clinical trials in ALS continue to rely on survival or clinical functional scales as endpoints, since anatomical patterns of disease spread in ALS are poorly characterized in vivo. In this study, we generated individual brain networks of patients and controls based on cerebral magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Then, we applied a computational model with a random walker to the brain MRI scan of patients to simulate this progressive network degeneration. We observe that computer‐simulated aggregation levels of the random walker mimic true disease patterns in ALS patients. Our results demonstrate the utility of computational network models in ALS to predict disease progression and underscore their potential as a prognostic biomarker.

After presenting this study on characterizing the structural changes in neurodegenerative diseases with network science, I will give an outlook on my new work on characterizing the dynamic changes in brain networks for Parkinson’s disease and counteracting these with (simulated) deep brain stimulation using the neuroinformatics platform The Virtual Brain (www.thevirtualbrain.org) .

Article link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ana.25706

We prove that bounded-degree expanders with non-negative Ollivier-Ricci curvature do not exist, thereby solving a long-standing open problem suggested by Naor and Milman and publicized by Ollivier (2010). In fact, this remains true even if we allow for a vanishing proportion of large degrees, large eigenvalues, and negatively-curved edges. To establish this, we work directly at the level of Benjamini-Schramm limits. More precisely, we exploit the entropic characterization of the Liouville property on stationary random graphs to show that non-negative curvature and spectral expansion are incompatible 'at infinity'. We then transfer this result to finite graphs via local weak convergence and a relative compactness argument. We believe that this 'local weak limit' approach to mixing properties of Markov chains will have many other applications.

The conformal bootstrap program for CFTs in d>2 dimensions is
based on well-defined rules and in principle it could be easily included
into rigorous mathematical physics. I will explain some interesting
conjectures which emerged from the program, but which so far lack rigorous
proof. No prior knowledge of CFTs or conformal bootstrap will be assumed.

Prof. Franco Rampazzo ‘Mathematical Control Theory’ (Department of Mathematics of the University of Padova, as part of Oxford Padova connection) TT 2021
Aimed at: Any DPhil students with interest in learning about Mathematical Control Theory
Course Length:     24 hours total (to be in English) 
Dates and Times:  starts 2 March 2021 

Nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations with measures as initial data and McKean-Vlasov equations This talk is about joint work with Viorel Barbu. We consider a class of nonlinear Fokker-Planck (- Kolmogorov) equations of type \begin{equation*} \frac{\partial}{\partial t} u(t,x) - \Delta_x\beta(u(t,x)) + \mathrm{div} \big(D(x)b(u(t,x))u(t,x)\big) = 0,\quad u(0,\cdot)=\mu, \end{equation*} where $(t,x) \in [0,\infty) \times \mathbb{R}^d$, $d \geq 3$ and $\mu$ is a signed Borel measure on $\mathbb{R}^d$ of bounded variation. In the first part of the talk we shall explain how to construct a solution to the above PDE based on classical nonlinear operator semigroup theory on $L^1(\mathbb{R}^d)$ and new results on $L^1- L^\infty$ regularization of the solution semigroups in our case. In the second part of the talk we shall present a general result about the correspondence of nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations (FPEs) and McKean-Vlasov type SDEs. In particular, it is shown that if one can solve the nonlinear FPE, then one can always construct a weak solution to the corresponding McKean-Vlasov SDE. We would like to emphasize that this, in particular, applies to the singular case, where the coefficients depend "Nemytski-type" on the time-marginal law of the solution process, hence the coefficients are not continuous in the measure-variable with respect to the weak topology on probability measures. This is in contrast to the literature in which the latter is standardly assumed. Hence we can cover nonlinear FPEs as the ones above, which are PDEs for the marginal law densities, realizing an old vision of McKean.

References V. Barbu, M. Röckner: From nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations to solutions of distribution dependent SDE, Ann. Prob. 48 (2020), no. 4, 1902-1920. V. Barbu, M. Röckner: Solutions for nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations with measures as initial data and McKean-Vlasov equations, J. Funct. Anal. 280 (2021), no. 7, 108926.

One of the main questions in the theory of the linear transport equation is whether uniqueness of solutions to the Cauchy problem holds in the case the given vector field is not smooth. We will show that even for incompressible, Sobolev (thus quite “well-behaved”) vector fields, uniqueness of solutions can drastically fail. This result can be seen as a counterpart to DiPerna and Lions’ well-posedness theorem, and, more generally, it can be interpreted as an instance of the “flexibility vs. rigidity” duality, which is a common feature of PDEs appearing in completely different fields, such as differential geometry and fluid dynamics (joint with G. Sattig and L. Székelyhidi). 

We will discuss the problem of deciding (algorithmically) whether a variety over a local field K has a K-rational point, surveying some known results. I will then allow K to be an infinite extension (of some arithmetic interest) of a local field and present some recent work.
 

Studying quasi-isometries between groups is a major theme in geometric group theory. Of particular interest are the situations where the existence of a quasi-isometry between two groups implies that the groups are equivalent in a stronger algebraic sense, such as being commensurable. I will survey some results of this type, and then talk about recent work with Daniel Woodhouse where we prove quasi-isometric rigidity for certain graphs of virtually free groups, which include "generic" cyclic HNN extensions of free groups.

We prove a homological mirror symmetry result for a one-parameter family of genus 2 curves (https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04227), and then mention current joint work with H. Azam, H. Lee, and C.-C. M. Liu on generalizing this to the 6-parameter family of all genus 2 curves.

First we describe the B-model genus 2 curve in a 4-torus and the geometric construction of the generalized SYZ mirror. Then we set up the Fukaya-Seidel category on the mirror. Finally we will see the main algebraic HMS result on homogenous coordinate rings, which is at the level of cohomology. The method involves first considering mirror symmetry for the 4-torus, then restricting to the hypersurface genus 2 curve and extending to a mirror Landau-Ginzburg model with fiber the mirror 4-torus. 

There has been a recent uptick in interest in fermionic CFTs. These mildly generalise the usual notion of CFT to allow dependence on a background spin structure. I will discuss how this generalisation manifests itself in the symmetries, anomalies, and boundary conditions of the theory, using the series of unitary Virasoro minimal models as an example.

The well known node2vec algorithm has been used to explore network structures and represent the nodes of a graph in a vector space in a way that reflects the structure of the graph. Random walks in node2vec have been used to study the local structure through pairwise interactions. Our motivation for this project comes from a desire to understand higher-order relationships by a similar approach. To this end, we propose an extension of node2vec to a method for representing the k-simplices of a simplicial complex into Euclidean space. 

In this talk I outline a way to do this by performing random walks on simplicial complexes, which have a greater variety of adjacency relations to take into account than in the case of graphs. The walks on simplices are then used to obtain a representation of the simplices. We will show cases in which this method can uncover the roles of higher order simplices in a network and help understand structures in graphs that cannot be seen by using just the random walks on the nodes. 

Saturated fusion systems capture and abstract conjugacy in $p$-subgroups of finite groups and have recently found application in finite group theory, representation theory and algebraic topology. In this talk, we describe a situation in which we may identify a rank $2$ amalgam within $\mathcal{F}$ and, using some local group theoretic techniques, completely determine $\mathcal{F}$ up to isomorphism.

Magnitude is an isometric invariant of metric spaces that was introduced by Tom Leinster in 2010, and is currently the object of intense research, since it has been shown to encode many invariants of a metric space such as volume, dimension, and capacity.

Magnitude homology is a homology theory for metric spaces that has been introduced by Hepworth-Willerton and Leinster-Shulman, and categorifies magnitude in a similar way as the singular homology of a topological space categorifies its Euler characteristic.

In this talk I will first introduce magnitude and magnitude homology. I will then give an overview of existing results and current research in this area, explain how magnitude homology is related to persistent homology, and finally discuss new stability results for magnitude and how it can be used to study point cloud data.

This talk is based on  joint work in progress with Miguel O’Malley and Sara Kalisnik, as well as the preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01540.

Zilber's Restricted Trichotomy Conjecture predicts that every sufficiently rich strongly minimal structure which can be interpreted from an algebraically closed field K, must itself interpret K. Progress toward this conjecture began in 1993 with the work of Rabinovich, and recently Hasson and Sustretov gave a full proof for structures with universe of dimension 1. In this talk I will discuss a partial result in characteristic zero for universes of dimension greater than 1: namely, the conjecture holds in this case under certain geometric restrictions on definable sets. Time permitting, I will discuss how this result implies the full conjecture for expansions of abelian varieties.

A new explanation of geometric nature of the reservoir computing phenomenon is presented. Reservoir computing is understood in the literature as the possibility of approximating input/output systems with randomly chosen recurrent neural systems and a trained linear readout layer. Light is shed on this phenomenon by constructing what is called strongly universal reservoir systems as random projections of a family of state-space systems that generate Volterra series expansions. This procedure yields a state-affine reservoir system with randomly generated coefficients in a dimension that is logarithmically reduced with respect to the original system. This reservoir system is able to approximate any element in the fading memory filters class just by training a different linear readout for each different filter. Explicit expressions for the probability distributions needed in the generation of the projected reservoir system are stated and bounds for the committed approximation error are provided.