The Helmholtz equation models waves propagating with a fixed frequency. Discretising the Helmholtz equation for high frequencies via standard finite-elements results in linear systems that are large, non-Hermitian, and indefinite. Therefore, when solving these linear systems, one uses preconditioned iterative methods. When one considers uncertainty quantification for the Helmholtz equation, one will typically need to solve many (thousands) of linear systems corresponding to different realisations of the coefficients. At face value, this will require the computation of many preconditioners, a potentially expensive task.

Therefore, we investigate how well a preconditioner for one realisation of the Helmholtz equation works as a preconditioner for another realisation. We prove that if the two realisations are 'nearby' (with a precise meaning of 'nearby'), then the preconditioner is robust (that is, preconditioned GMRES converges in a number of iterations that is independent of frequency). We also give some preliminary computational results indicating the speedup one obtains in uncertainty quantification calculations.

Gallagher's theorem is a strengthening of the Littlewood conjecture that holds for almost all pairs of real numbers. I'll discuss some recent refinements of Gallagher's theorem, one of which is joint work with Niclas Technau. A key new ingredient is the correspondence between Bohr sets and generalised arithmetic progressions. It is hoped that these are the first steps towards a metric theory of multiplicative diophantine approximation on manifolds. 

The focus of this talk is how to tackle huge linear least square problems via sketching, a dimensionality reduction technique from randomised numerical linear algebra. The technique allows us to project the huge problem to a smaller dimension that captures essential information of the original problem. We can then solve the projected problem directly to obtain a low accuracy solution or using the projected problem to construct a preconditioner for the original problem to obtain a high accuracy solution. I will survey the existing projection techniques and evaluate the performance of sketching for linear least square problems by comparing it to the state-of-the-art traditional solution methods. More than ten-fold speed-up has been observed in some cases.

A common strategy to solve shape optimization problems is to select an initial domain and to update it iteratively until it satisfies certain optimality crietria. In the presence of PDE-constraints, computing these updates requires solving a boundary value problem on a domain that changes at every iteration. We explain how to use isoparametric finite elements to tackle this issue. We also show how finite elements allow computing these updates without deriving shape derivative formulas by hand.

Many toric degenerations and integrable systems of the Grassmannians Gr(2, n) are described by trees, or equivalently subdivisions of polygons. These degenerations can also be seen to arise from the cones of the tropicalisation of the Grassmannian. In this talk, I focus on particular combinatorial types of cones in tropical Grassmannians Gr(k,n) and prove a necessary condition for such an initial degeneration to be toric. I will present several combinatorial conjectures and computational challenges around this problem.  This is based on joint works with Kristin Shaw and with Oliver Clarke.

The E-string theory is usually considered as the simplest among 6D (1,0) superconformal field theories. Nonetheless, we still have little information about its spectrum of operators. In this talk, I'm going to describe our recent geometric approach using F-theory compactification on an elliptic Calabi-Yau threefold. The elliptic fibration is non-flat, which means that there are complex surface components in the fiber direction. From the geometry of non-flat fiber, we read out an infinite tower of particle states in the E-string theory. I will also discuss its relevance to 4D standard model building, which is a main motivation of this work.