Using tropical geometry and new methods in the theory of Fukaya categories, we explain a mirror symmetry equivalence relating the Fukaya category of a hypersurface and the category of coherent sheaves on the boundary of a toric variety.

Many metallurgical processes involve the heat treatment of granular material due to large alternating currents. To understand how the current propagates through the material, one must understand the bulk resistivity, that is, the resistivity of the granular material as a whole. The literature suggests that the resistance due to contacts between particles contributes significantly to the bulk resistivity, therefore one must pay particular attention to these contacts. 

My work is focused on understanding the precise impact of small contacts on the current propagation. The scale of the contacts is several order of magnitude smaller than that of the furnace itself, therefore we apply matched asymptotics methods to study how the current varies with the size of the contact.

We construct maximal surfaces with Neumann boundary conditions in Minkowski space using mean curvature flow. In particular we find curvature conditions on a boundary manifold so that mean curvature flow may be shown to exist for all time, and give conditions under which the maximal hypersurfaces are stable under the flow.

In this talk I will first briefly introduce 1-parameter persistent homology, and discuss some applications and the theoretical challenges in the multiparameter case. If time remains I will explain how tools from commutative algebra give invariants suitable for the study of data. This last part is based on the preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07390.
 

A class C of graphs has polynomial expansion if there exists a polynomial p such that for every graph G from C and for every integer r, each minor of G obtained by contracting disjoint subgraphs of radius at most r is p(r)-degenerate. Classes with polynomial expansion exhibit interesting structural, combinatorial, and algorithmic properties. In the talk, I will survey these properties and propose further research directions.

Reed conjectured in 1998 that the chromatic number of a graph should be at most the average of the clique number (a trivial lower bound) and maximum degree plus one (a trivial upper bound); in support of this conjecture, Reed proved that the chromatic number is at most some nontrivial convex combination of these two quantities.  King and Reed later showed that a fraction of roughly 1/130000 away from the upper bound holds. Motivated by a paper by Bruhn and Joos, last year Bonamy, Perrett, and I proved that for large enough maximum degree, a fraction of 1/26 away from the upper bound holds. Then using new techniques, Delcourt and I showed that the list-coloring version holds; moreover, we improved the fraction for ordinary coloring to 1/13. Most recently, Kelly and I proved that a 'local' list version holds with a fraction of 1/52 wherein the degrees, list sizes, and clique sizes of vertices are allowed to vary.
 

A subset S of initially infected vertices of a graph G is called forcing if we can infect the entire graph by iteratively applying the following process. At each step, any infected vertex which has a unique uninfected neighbour, infects this neighbour. The forcing number of G is the minimum cardinality of a forcing set in G. It was introduced independently as a bound for the minimum rank of a graph, and as a tool in quantum information theory.

The focus of this talk is on the forcing number of the random graph. Furthermore, we will state our bounds on the forcing number of pseudorandom graphs and related problems. The results are joint work with Thomas Kalinowski and Benny Sudakov.

Enumerating families of combinatorial objects with given properties and describing the typical structure of these objects are fundamental problems in extremal combinatorics. In this talk, we will investigate intersecting families of discrete structures in various settings, determining their typical structure as the size of the underlying ground set tends to infinity. Our new approach outlines a general framework for a number of similar problems; in particular, we prove analogous results for hypergraphs, permutations, and vector spaces using the same technique. This is joint work with József Balogh, Shagnik Das, Hong Liu, and Maryam Sharifzadeh.

Given a graph $G$, we can form a hypergraph $H$ whose edges correspond to the triangles in $G$. If $G$ is the standard Erdős-Rényi random graph with independent edges, then $H$ is random, but its edges are not independent, because of overlapping triangles. This is (presumably!) a major complication when proving results about triangles in random graphs.  However, it turns out that, for many purposes, we can treat the triangles as independent, in a one-sided sense (and losing something in the density): we can find an independent random hypergraph within the set of triangles. I will present two proofs, one of which generalizes to larger complete (and some non-complete) subgraphs.