Past

Stability plays an important role in engineering, for it limits the load carrying capacity of all kinds of structures. Many failure mechanisms in advanced engineering materials are stability-related, such as localized deformation zones occurring in fiber-reinforced composites and cellular materials, used in aerospace and packaging applications. Moreover, modern biomedical applications, such as vascular stents, orthodontic wire etc., are based on shape memory alloys (SMA’s) that exploit the displacive phase transformations in these solids, which are macroscopic manifestations of lattice-level instabilities.

The presentation starts with the introduction of the concepts of stability and bifurcation for conservative elastic systems with a particular emphasis on solids with periodic microstructures. The concept of Bloch wave analysis is introduced, which allows one to find the lowest load instability mode of an infinite, perfect structure, based solely on unit cell considerations. The relation between instability at the microscopic level and macroscopic properties of the solid is studied for several types of applications involving different scales: composites (fiber-reinforced), cellular solids (hexagonal honeycomb) and finally SMA's, where temperature- or stress-induced instabilities at the atomic level have macroscopic manifestations visible to the naked eye.

This talk will attempt to say something about the p-adic zeta function, a p-adic analytic object which encodes information about Galois cohomology of Tate twists in its special values. We first explain the construction of the p-adic zeta function, via p-adic Fourier theory. Then, after saying something about Coleman integration, we will explain the interpretation of special values of the p-adic zeta function as limiting values of p-adic polylogarithms, in analogy with the Archimedean case. Finally, we will explore the consequences for the de Rham and etale fundamental groupoids of the projective line minus three points.

In this talk, I will focus on an infinite class of 3d N=4 gauge theories

which can be constructed from a certain set of ordered pairs of integer

partitions. These theories can be elegantly realised on brane intervals in

string theory.  I will give an elementary review on such brane constructions

and introduce to the audience a symmetry, known as mirror symmetry, which

exchanges two different phases (namely the Higgs and Coulomb phases) of such

theories.  Using mirror symmetry as a tool, I will discuss a certain

geometrical aspect of the vacuum moduli spaces of such theories in the

Coulomb phase. It turns out that there are certain infinite subclasses of

such spaces which are special and rather simple to study; they are complete intersections. I will mention some details and many interesting features of these spaces.

 Consider a fully-connected social network of people, companies,
or countries, modeled as an undirected complete graph with real numbers on
its edges. Positive edges link friends; negative edges link enemies.
I'll discuss two simple models of how the edge weights of such networks
might evolve over time, as they seek a balanced state in which "the enemy of
my enemy is my friend." The mathematical techniques involve elementary
ideas from linear algebra, random graphs, statistical physics, and
differential equations. Some motivating examples from international
relations and social psychology will also be discussed. This is joint work
with Seth Marvel, Jon Kleinberg, and Bobby Kleinberg. 

Data assimilation in highly nonlinear and high dimensional systems is a hard

problem. We do have efficient data-assimilation methods for high-dimensional

weakly nonlinear systems, exploited in e.g. numerical weather forecasting.

And we have good methods for low-dimensional (

In this talk, we elaborate on the notions of no-free-lunch that have proved essential in the theory of financial mathematics---most notably, arbitrage of the first kind. Focus will be given in most recent developments. The precise connections with existence of deflators, numeraires and pricing measures are explained, as well as the consequences that these notions have in the existence of bubbles and the valuation of illiquid assets in the market.

ARKeX is a geophysical exploration company that conducts airborne gravity gradiometer surveys for the oil industry. By measuring the variations in the gravity field it is possible to infer valuable information about the sub-surface geology and help find prospective areas.

A new type of gravity gradiometer instrument is being developed to have higher resolution than the current technology. The basic operating principles are fairly simple - essentially measuring the relative displacement of two proof masses in response to a change in the gravity field. The challenge is to be able to see typical signals from geological features in the presence of large amounts of motional noise due to the aircraft. Fortunately, by making a gradient measurement, a lot of this noise is cancelled by the instrument itself. However, due to engineering tolerances, the instrument is not perfect and residual interference remains in the measurement.

Accelerometers and gyroscopes record the motional disturbances and can be used to mathematically model how the noise appears in the instrument and remove it during a software processing stage. To achieve this, we have employed methods taken from the field of system identification to produce models having typically 12 inputs and a single output. Generally, the models contain linear transfer functions that are optimised during a training stage where controlled accelerations are applied to the instrument in the absence of any anomalous gravity signal. After training, the models can be used to predict and remove the noise from data sets that contain signals of interest.

High levels of accuracy are required in the noise correction schemes to achieve the levels of data quality required for airborne exploration. We are therefore investigating ways to improve on our existing methods, or find alternative techniques. In particular, we believe non-linear and non-stationary models show benefits for this situation.

Nematic liquid crystals (NLCs) are materials that flow like liquids, but have some crystalline features. Their molecules are typically long and thin, and tend to align locally, which imparts some elastic character to the NLC. Moreover at interfaces between the NLC and some other material (such as a rigid silicon substrate, or air) the molecules tend to have a preferred direction (so-called "surface anchoring"). This preferred behaviour at interfaces, coupled with the internal "elasticity", can give rise to complex instabilities in spreading free surface films. This talk will discuss modelling approaches to describe such flows. The models presented are capable of capturing many of the key features observed experimentally, including arrested spreading (with or without instability). Both 2D and 3D spreading scenarios will be considered, and simple ways to model nontrivial surface anchoring patterns, and "defects" within the flows will also be discussed.

Although much work has been done on using RBFs for reconstructing arbitrary surfaces, using RBFs to solve PDEs on arbitrary manifolds is only now being considered and is the subject of this talk. We will review current methods and introduce a new technique that is loosely inspired by the Closest Point Method. This new technique, the Orthogonal Gradients Method (OGr), benefits from the advantages of using RBFs: the simplicity, the high accuracy but also the meshfree character, which gives the flexibility to represent the most complex geometries in any dimension.

In this talk I will survey the results on the existence of solutions of the semigeostrophic system, a fully nonlinear reduction of the Navier-Stokes equation that constitute a valid model when the effect of rotation dominate the atmospheric flow. I will give an account of the theory developed since the pioneering work of Brenier in the early 90's, to more recent results obtained in a joint work with Mike Cullen and David Gilbert.

Expander graphs are sparse finite graphs with strong connectivity properties, on account of which they are much sought after in the construction of networks and in coding theory. Surprisingly, the first examples of large expander graphs came not from combinatorics, but from the representation theory of semisimple Lie groups. In this introductory talk, I will outline some of the history of the emergence of such examples from group theory, and give several applications of expander graphs to group theoretic problems.

See http://www.essex.ac.uk/maths/people/fremlin/chap53.pdf (538S)

The reaction-diffusion master equation (RDME) is a popular model in systems biology. In the RDME, diffusion is modeled as discrete jumps between voxels in the computational domain. However, it has been demonstrated that a more fine-grained model is required to resolve all the dynamics of some highly diffusion-limited systems.

In Greenʼs Function Reaction Dynamics (GFRD), a method based on the Smoluchowski model, diffusion is modeled continuously in space.

This will be more accurate at fine scales, but also less efficient than a discrete-space model.

We have developed a hybrid method, combining the RDME and the GFRD method, making it possible to do the more expensive fine-grained simulations only for the species and in the parts of space where it is required in order to resolve all the dynamics, and more coarse-grained simulations where possible. We have applied this method to a model of a MAPK-pathway, and managed to reduce the number of molecules simulated with GFRD by orders of magnitude and without an appreciable loss of accuracy.

Derived moduli stacks extend moduli stacks to give families over simplicial or dg rings. Lurie's representability theorem gives criteria for a functor to be representable by a derived geometric stack, and I will introduce a variant of it. This establishes representability for problems such as moduli of sheaves and moduli of polarised schemes.

With the advent of powerful computers and the internet, our ability to collect and store large amounts of data has improved tremendously over the past decades. As a result, methods for extracting useful information from these large datasets have gained in importance. In many cases the data can be conveniently represented as a network, where the nodes are entities of interest and the edges encode the relationships between them. Community detection aims to identify sets of nodes that are more densely connected internally than to the rest of the network. Many popular methods for partitioning a network into communities rely on heuristically optimising a quality function. This approach can run into problems for large networks, as the quality function often becomes near degenerate with many near optimal partitions that can potentially be quite different from each other. In this talk I will show that this near degeneracy, rather than being a severe problem, can potentially allow us to extract additional information

based on joint work with Charles Fefferman (Princeton) and Kevin Luli (Yale).

Vinogradov's three prime theorem resolves the weak Goldbach conjecture for sufficiently large integers. We discuss some of the ideas behind the proof, and discuss some of the obstacles to completing a proof of the odd goldbach conjecture.

For a fixed background manifold $M$ and parameter-space $X$, the associated configuration space is the space of $n$-point subsets of $M$ with parameters drawn from $X$ attached to each point of the subset, topologised in a natural way so that points cannot collide. One can either remember or forget the ordering of the n points in the configuration, so there are ordered and unordered versions of each configuration space.

It is a classical result that the sequence of unordered configuration spaces, as $n$ increases, is homologically stable: for each $k$ the degree-$k$ homology is eventually independent of $n$. However, a simple counterexample shows that this result fails for ordered configuration spaces. So one could ask whether it's possible to remember part of the ordering information and still have homological stability.

The goal of this talk is to explain the ideas behind a positive answer to this question, using 'oriented configuration spaces', in which configurations are equipped with an ordering - up to even permutations - of their points. I will also explain how this case differs from the unordered case: for example the 'rate' at which the homology stabilises is strictly slower for oriented configurations.

If time permits, I will also say something about homological stability with twisted coefficients.

We find the order of growth of the typical number of components of zero sets of smooth random functions of several real variables. This might be thought as a statistical version of the (first half of) 16th Hilbert problem. The primary examples are various ensembles of Gaussian real-valued polynomials (algebraic or trigonometric) of large degree, and smooth Gaussian functions on the Euclidean space with translation-invariant distribution.

Joint work with Fedor Nazarov.