The Premier League football season starts on 12 September and that means so does the Fantasy Premier League. So how are you going to play it this time? Need some tips? Joshua Bull from Oxford Mathematics won last season’s competition from nearly 8 million entrants. He kicks off the new Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture Season by telling you how.
14:15
Segre and Verlinde formulas for moduli of sheaves on surfaces
Abstract
This is a report on joint work with Martijn Kool.
Recently, Marian-Oprea-Pandharipande established a generalization of Lehn’s conjecture for Segre numbers associated to Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces. Extending work of Johnson, they provided a conjectural correspondence between Segre and Verlinde numbers. For surfaces with holomorphic 2-form, we propose conjectural generalizations of their results to moduli spaces of stable sheaves of higher rank.
Using Mochizuki’s formula, we derive a universal function which expresses virtual Segre and Verlinde numbers of surfaces with holomorphic 2-form in terms of Seiberg- Witten invariants and intersection numbers on products of Hilbert schemes of points. We use this to verify our conjectures in examples.
On Wasserstein projections
Abstract
We study the minimum Wasserstein distance from the empirical measure to a space of probability measures satisfying linear constraints. This statistic can naturally be used in a wide range of applications, for example, optimally choosing uncertainty sizes in distributionally robust optimization, optimal regularization, testing fairness, martingality, among many other statistical properties. We will discuss duality results which recover the celebrated Kantorovich-Rubinstein duality when the manifold is sufficiently rich and associated test statistics as the sample size increases. We illustrate how this relaxation can beat the statistical curse of dimensionality often associated to empirical Wasserstein distances.
The talk builds on joint work with S. Ghosh, Y. Kang, K. Murthy, M. Squillante, and N. Si.
Two perspectives on the stack of principal bundles on an elliptic curve and its slices
Abstract
Let G be a reductive group, E an elliptic curve, and Bun_G the moduli stack of principal G-bundles on E. In this talk, I will attempt to explain why Bun_G is a very interesting object from the perspectives of both singularity theory on the one hand, and shifted symplectic geometry and representation theory on the other. In the first part of the talk, I will explain how to construct slices of Bun_G through points corresponding to unstable bundles, and how these are linked to certain singular algebraic surfaces and their deformations in the case of a "subregular" bundle. In the second (probably much shorter) part, I will discuss the shifted symplectic geometry of Bun_G and its slices. If time permits, I will sketch how (conjectural) quantisations of these structures should be related to some well known algebras of an "elliptic" flavour, such as Sklyanin and Feigin-Odesskii algebras, and elliptic quantum groups.
Smith theory in filtered Floer homology and Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms
Abstract
We describe how Smith theory applies in the setting of Hamiltonian Floer homology filtered by the action functional, and provide applications to questions regarding Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms, including the Hofer-Zehnder conjecture on the existence of infinitely many periodic points and a question of McDuff-Salamon on Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of finite order.
Cohomology of the moduli of Higgs bundles and the Hausel-Thaddeus conjecture
Abstract
In this talk, I will discuss some results on the structure of the cohomology of the moduli space of stable SL_n Higgs bundles on a curve.
One consequence is a new proof of the Hausel-Thaddeus conjecture proven previously by Groechenig-Wyss-Ziegler via p-adic integration.
We will also discuss connections to the P=W conjecture if time permits. Based on joint work with Junliang Shen.
Joshua Bull - Can maths tell us how to win at Fantasy Football?
Fantasy Football is played by millions of people worldwide, and there are countless strategies that you can choose to try to beat your friends and win the game. But what’s the best way to play? Should you be patient and try to grind out a win, or are you better off taking some risks and going for glory? Should you pick players in brilliant form, or players with a great run of fixtures coming up? And what is this Fantasy Football thing anyway?
As with many of life’s deep questions, maths can help us shed some light on the answers. We’ll explore some classic mathematical problems which help us understand the world of Fantasy Football. We’ll apply some of the modelling techniques that mathematicians use in their research to the problem of finding better Fantasy Football management strategies. And - if we’re lucky - we’ll answer the big question: Can maths tell us how to win at Fantasy Football?
Joshua Bull is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Mathematical Institute in Oxford and the winner of the 2019-2020 Premier League Fantasy Football competition (from nearly 8 million entrants).
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The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.