Mon, 27 Oct 2025
16:00
C3

On the distribution of very short character sums

Paweł Nosal
(University of Warwick)
Abstract
In their paper concerning quadratic residues Davenport and Erdős show that normalized sums of Legendre symbols $(\tfrac{n}{p})$ of suitable length $H(p) = p^{o(1)}$, with uniformly random starting point $X \in [0,...,p-1]$ obey the Central Limit Theorem, as the size of prime conductor goes to infinity.  
 
Recently, Basak, Nath and Zaharescu proved that the CLT still holds, if we pick $X$ uniformly at random from $[0,...,(\log p)^A], A>1$ , set $H(p) = (\log p)^{o(1)}$ and take the limit along full density subset of primes.  
 
In this talk, I will present a modification of their approach, inspired by the work of Harper on short character sums over moving intervals. This allows us to obtain the CLT of this type with $X$ uniformly random from $[0,...,g(p)]$ with practically arbitrary $g(p) \ll p^{\epsilon}$ for all $\epsilon >0$.
Mon, 20 Oct 2025
16:00
C3

An application of Goursat’s Lemma to the irreducibility of Galois representations

Zachary Feng
(University of Oxford)
Abstract
Goursat’s Lemma is an elementary, but perhaps niche, result in group theory classifying subdirect products of the product of two groups. In this talk, I will review what this lemma says, and describe how it can be used to deduce the irreducibility of Galois representations.

 
Bridging a gap: a heavy elastica between point supports
Curtis, G Griffiths, I Vella, D International Journal of Solids and Structures volume 326 (29 Oct 2025) doi:10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2025.113702
The informal diplomacies of Oswald Veblen
Hollings, C Kennedy, S Luciano, E Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society volume 63 issue 3 491-529 (29 Apr 2026) doi:10.1090/bull/1886
Thu, 06 Nov 2025

16:00 - 17:00
L5

The value of information flows in the stock market - joint with Hai Duong

Prof. Bart Taub
(University of Glasgow)
Abstract
Stock market traders who trade because of information they possess reveal that information to the rest of the market in the process of bidding: if the information is positive they bid up the price, and if it is negative they lower it.   New information constantly develops and is brought to the market in this way, and because it influences prices, it ultimately influences the allocation of investments by firms.  
 
Using a new approach, we estimate the flow of this information and the price of that information (different from the stock price), and thus its value, for each stock, and then sum up this value across all stocks, obtaining an estimate of the total value of the dynamic flow of information in the stock market as a whole. This requires digesting the records of millions of stock orders (including cancelled orders, not just executed trades) to construct the dynamic limit order book and estimate the information flow and value from its structure.  
 
Our results support the notion that the cross-correlation of price impact across stocks is consistent with the CAPM: there is a single systematic component of price impact, and this is driven by the volatility of the systematic component of the stock market. This result suggests that by separating the underlying information into two components, systematic and idiosyncratic, informed traders distinguish between productive assets that have a systematic impact on the economy and those that can be diversified.  


 

This track is from the soundtrack to the Louis Malle 1958 film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. Apparently Davis only gave the musicians a few rudimentary harmonic sequences, and, once the plot was explained, the band improvised without any precomposed theme, while edited loops of the relevant film sequences were projected in the background.

Makes you want to go to the movies.

QSHS: an axion dark matter resonant search apparatus
Alsulami, A Bailey, I Carosi, G Chapman, G Chakraborty, B Daw, E Du, N Durham, S Esmenda, J Gallop, J Gamble, T Godfrey, T Gregori, G Halliday, J Hao, L Hardy, E Laird, E Leek, P March-Russell, J Meeson, P Mostyn, C Pashkin, Y Peatain, S Perry, M Piscitelli, M Reig, M Sarkar, S Sokolov, A Tan, B Withington, S New Journal of Physics volume 27 issue 10 (06 Oct 2025) doi:10.1088/1367-2630/ae0756
Nonequilibrium physics of brain dynamics
Nartallo-Kaluarachchi, R Kringelbach, M Deco, G Lambiotte, R Goriely, A Physics Reports volume 1152 1-43 (24 Oct 2025) doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2025.10.003
Topology across scales on heterogeneous cell data
Torras-Pérez, M Yoon, I Weeratunga, P Ho, L Byrne, H Tillmann, U Harrington, H PLoS Computational Biology volume 21 issue 10 (15 Oct 2025) doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013460
Tue, 17 Feb 2026
15:30
L4

Descendent generating series for Pandharipande-Thomas stable pairs on Fano 3-folds

Reginald Anderson
(UC Irvine, California)
Abstract

We adapt Joyce's theory of wall-crossing for enumerative invariants of $\mathbb C$-linear additive categories to Pandharipande-Thomas stable pairs on smooth projective Fano 3-folds of "type C or D", and investigate implications for Pandharipande-Thomas generating functions with descendent insertions.

By analyzing the wall-crossing behavior from a stability condition where pairs are unstable to the standard stability condition for PT stable pairs, we derive an explicit formula expressing the PT stable pair invariants $[P_n(X,\beta)]^{virt}$ in terms of sheaf-theoretic invariants $[\mathcal M^{ss}_{(0,0,\beta_i, n_i - \beta_i.c_1/2)}(\tau_-)]_{\rm inv}$ for the moduli space of Gieseker semistable coherent sheaves on $X$ with Chern character $(0,0,\beta_i, n_i - \beta_i.c_1/2)$.

These enumerative invariants are defined as elements in the Lie algebra on the rational Betti homology of the piecewise-linear rigidified higher moduli stack of objects in the bounded derived category of X. Under tensoring by a line bundle, we exhibit a control over the periodicity of sheaf-theoretic invariants with respect to the Euler characteristic $n_i$, which we use to show that the sheaf-theoretic invariants form a quasi-polynomial in $n_i$ of degree $2$ with period given by the divisibility of $\beta_i$ in the lattice $H_2(X,\mathbb Z)/\text{torsion}$.

We use this periodicity in the sheaf-theoretic invariants to show that the descendent generating series for Pandharipande-Thomas stable pairs is the Laurent expansion of a rational function over $\mathbb Q$ in this setting, thus confirming a conjecture due to Pandharipande-Thomas from 2007. Furthermore, we construct a counterexample to a conjecture due to Pandharipande from 2017 on the location of the poles of the descendent generating series, and give a direct proof of a slightly modified conjecture on the location of these poles using wall-crossing techniques.

 

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