This talk is a brief introduction to the analysis of Donaldson theory, a branch of gauge theory. Roughly, this is an area of differential topology that aims to extract smooth structure invariants from the geometry of the space of solutions (moduli space) to a system of partial differential equations: the Yang-Mills equations.

I will start by discussing the differential geometric background required to talk about Yang-Mills connections. This will involve introducing the concepts of principal fibre bundles, connections and curvature. In the second half of the talk I will attempt to convey the flavour of the mathematics used to address technical issues in gauge theory. I plan to do this by presenting a sketch of the proof of Uhlenbeck's compactness theorem, the main technical tool involved in the compactification of the moduli space.

Property (FA) is one of the `rigidity properties’ defined for groups, concerning the way a group can act on trees. We’ll take a look at why you might be interested in an action on a tree, what the property is, and then investigate which automorphism groups of free products have it.

The last decade or so has seen substantial progress in the theory of (outer) automorphism groups of right-angled Artin groups (RAAGs), spearheaded by work of Charney and Vogtmann. Many of the techniques used for RAAGs also apply to a wider class of groups, graph products of finitely generated abelian groups, which includes right-angled Coxeter groups (RACGs). In this talk, I will give an introduction to automorphism groups of such graph products, and describe recent developments surrounding the outer automorphism groups of RACGs, explaining the links to what we know in the RAAG case.

It is unnecessary to emphasize important place of algorithms in computer science. Many efficient and convenient algorithms are designed by borrowing or revising ancient mathematical algorithms and methods. For example, recursive method, exhaustive search method, greedy method, “divide and conquer” method, dynamic programming method, reiteration algorithm, circulation algorithm, among others.

From the perspective of the history of computer science, it is necessary to study the history of algorithms used in the computer computations. The history of algorithms for computer science is naturally regarded as a sub-object of history of mathematics. But historians of mathematics, at least those who study history of mathematics in China, have not realized it is important in the history of mathematics. Historians of Chinese mathematics paid little attention to these studies, mainly having not considered from this research angle. Relevant research is therefore insufficient in the field of history of mathematics.

The mechanization thought and algorithmization characteristic of Chinese traditional (and therefore, East Asian) mathematics, however, are coincident with that of computer science. Traditional Chinese algorithms, therefore, show their importance historical significance in computer science. It is necessary and important to survey traditional algorithms again from the point of views of computer science. It is also another angle for understanding traditional Chinese mathematics.

There are many things in the field that need to be researched. For example, when and how were these algorithms designed? What was their mathematical background? How were they applied in ancient mathematical context? How are their complexity and efficiency of ancient algorithms?

In the present paper, we will study the circulation structure in traditional Chinese mathematical algorithms. Circulation structures have great importance in the computer science. Most algorithms are designed by means of one or more circulation structures. Ancient Chinese mathematicians were familiar them with the circulation structures and good at their applications. They designed a lot of circulation structures to obtain their desirable results in mathematical computations. Their circulation structures of dozen ancient algorithms will be analyzed. They are selected from mathematical and astronomical treatises, and also one from the Yijing (Book of Changes), the oldest of the Chinese classics.

In this talk, I will present our recent progress collaborated with Prof. Gui-Qiang G. Chen and Prof. Paolo Secchi on two kinds of characteristic discontinuities: relativistic vortex sheets in three-dimensional Minkowski spacetime and multi-dimensional thermoelastic contact discontinuities.
 

A virtue of the special geometry underlying the string theory moduli space of  Calabi--Yau manifolds is the existence of a canonical choice of moduli space coordinates. In heterotic theories, as much as we would desire it, there is no obvious choice of coordinates and so we should be covariant. I will discuss some issues in doing this.

The notion of a higher Segal object was introduces by Dyckerhoff and Kapranov as a general framework for studying (higher) associativity inherent
in a wide range of mathematical objects. Most of the examples are related to Hall algebra type constructions, which include quantum groups. We describe a construction that assigns to a simplicial object S a datum H(S)  which is naturally interpreted as a "d-lax A-infinity algebra” precisely when S is a (d+1)-Segal object. This extends the extensively studied d=2 case.