In the 1980s, gauge theory was used to provide new invariants (up to
diffeomorphism) of orientable four dimensional manifolds, by counting
solutions of certain equations up to to a choice of gauge. More
recently, similar techniques have been used to study manifolds of
different dimensions, most notably on Spin(7) and G_2 manifolds. Using
dimensional reduction, one can find candidates for gauge theoretic
equations on manifolds of lower dimension. The talk will give an
overview of gauge theory in the 4 and 8 dimensional cases, and how
gauge theory on Spin(7) manifolds could be used to develop a gauge
theory on 5 dimensional manifolds.

In 2008 Pila and Zannier used a Theorem coming from Logic, proven by Pila and Wilkie, to give a new proof of the Manin-Mumford Conjecture, creating a new, powerful way to prove Theorems in Diophantine Geometry. The Pila-Wilkie Theorem gives an upper bound on the number of rational points on analytic varieties which are not algebraic; this bound usually contradicts a Galois-theoretic bound obtained by arithmetic considerations. We show how this technique can be applied to the following problem of Lang: given an irreducible polynomial f(x,y) in C[x,y], if for infinitely many pairs of roots of unity (a,b) we have f(a,b)=0, then f(x,y) is either of the form x^my^n-c or x^m-cy^n for c a root of unity.

In the '80s, Gromov proved that sequences of Riemannian manifold with a lower bound on the Ricci curvature and an upper bound on the dimension are precompact in the measured Gromov--Hausdorff topology (mGH for short). Since then, much attention has been given to the limits of such sequences, called Ricci limit spaces. A way to study these limits is to introduce a synthetic definition of Ricci curvature lower bounds and dimension upper bounds. A synthetic definition should not rely on an underlying smooth structure and should be stable when passing to the limit in the mGH topology. In this talk, I will briefly introduce CD spaces, which are a generalization of Ricci limit spaces.

Great progress has been made recently in exploiting categorical/topological/higher symmetries in quantum field theory. I will explain how the same structure is realised directly in the lattice models of statistical mechanics, generalizing Kramers-Wannier duality to a wide class of models. In particular, I will give an overview of my work with Aasen and Mong on using fusion categories to find and analyse lattice topological defects in two and 1+1 dimensions.  These defects possess a variety of remarkable properties. Not only is the partition function is independent of deformations of their path, but they can branch and fuse in a topologically invariant fashion.  The universal behaviour under Dehn twists gives exact results for scaling dimensions, while gluing a topological defect to a boundary allows universal ratios of the boundary g-factor to be computed exactly on the lattice.  I also will describe how terminating defect lines allows the construction of fractional-spin conserved currents, giving a linear method for Baxterization, I.e. constructing integrable models from a braided tensor category.

The global symmetries of a d-dimensional quantum field theory (QFT), and their ’t Hooft anomalies, are conveniently captured by a topological field theory (TFT) in (d+1) dimensions, which we may refer to as the Symmetry TFT of the given d-dimensional QFT. This point of view has a vast range of applicability: it encompasses both ordinary symmetries, as well as generalized symmetries. In this talk, I will discuss systematic methods to compute the Symmetry TFT for QFTs realized by M-theory on a singular, non-compact space X. The desired Symmetry TFT is extracted from the topological couplings of 11d supergravity, via reduction on the space L, the boundary of X. The formalism of differential cohomology allows us to include discrete symmetries originating from torsion in the cohomology of L. I will illustrate this framework in two classes of examples: M-theory on an ALE space (engineering 7d SYM theory); M-theory on Calabi-Yau cones (engineering 5d superconformal field theories).

In this talk, I will talk about the category of coherent sheaves on the affine Flag variety of a simply-connected reductive group over $\mathbb{C}$. In particular, I'll explain how the convolution product naturally leads to a construction of the Iwahori-Hecke algebra, and present some combinatorics related to computing duals in this category.

Neural networks have shown great success at learning function approximators between spaces X and Y, in the setting where X is a finite dimensional Euclidean space and where Y is either a finite dimensional Euclidean space (regression) or a set of finite cardinality (classification); the neural networks learn the approximator from N data pairs {x_n, y_n}. In many problems arising in the physical and engineering sciences it is desirable to generalize this setting to learn operators between spaces of functions X and Y. The talk will overview recent work in this context.

Then the talk will focus on work aimed at addressing the problem of learning operators which define the constitutive model characterizing the macroscopic behaviour of multiscale materials arising in material modeling. Mathematically this corresponds to using machine learning to determine appropriate homogenized equations, using data generated at the microscopic scale. Applications to visco-elasticity and crystal-plasticity are given.

 I will present a scenario where the early universe is in a topological phase of gravity.  I will discuss a number of analogies which motivate considering gravity in such a phase. Cosmological puzzles such as the horizon problem provide a phenomenological connection to this phase and can be explained in terms of its topological nature. To obtain phenomenological estimates, a concrete realization of this scenario using Witten's four dimensional topological gravity will be used. In this model, the CMB power spectrum can be estimated by certain conformal anomaly coefficients. A qualitative prediction of this phase is the absence of tensor modes in cosmological fluctuations.

TBC