University of Warwick

In 1851, Carl Jacobi made the experimental observation that all integers are sums of seven non-negative cubes, with precisely 17 exceptions, the largest of which is 454. Building on previous work by Maillet, Landau, Dickson, Linnik, Watson, Bombieri, Ramaré, Elkies and many others, we complete the proof of Jacobi's observation.

Graphons and permutons are analytic objects associated with convergent sequences of graphs and permutations, respectively. Problems from extremal combinatorics and theoretical computer science led to a study of graphons and permutons determined by finitely many substructure densities, which are referred to as finitely forcible. The talk will contain several results on finite forcibility, focusing on the relation between finite forcibility of graphons and permutons. We also disprove a conjecture of Lovasz and Szegedy about the dimension of the space of typical vertices of finitely forcible graphons. The talk is based on joint work with Roman Glebov, Andrzej Grzesik and Dan Kral.

Tropicalization replaces a variety by a polyhedral complex that is a "combinatorial shadow" of the original variety.  This allows algebraic geometric problems to be attacked using combinatorial and
polyhedral techniques.  While this idea has proved surprisingly effective over the last decade, it has so far been restricted to the study of varieties and algebraic cycles.  I will discuss joint work with Felipe Rincon, building on work of Jeff and Noah Giansiracusa, to understand tropicalizing schemes, and more generally the concept of a tropical scheme.

The Cohen-Lenstra heuristics, postulated in the early 80s, conceptually explained numerous phenomena in the behaviour of ideal class groups of number fields that had puzzled mathematicians for decades, by proposing a probabilistic model: the probability that the class group of an imaginary quadratic field is isomorphic to a given group $A$ is inverse proportional to $\#\text{Aut}(A)$. This is a very natural model for random algebraic objects. But the probability weights for more general number fields, while agreeing well with experiments, look rather mysterious. I will explain how to recover the original heuristic in a very conceptual way by phrasing it in terms of Arakelov class groups instead. The main difficulty that one needs to overcome is that Arakelov class groups typically have infinitely many automorphisms. We build up a theory of commensurability of modules, of groups, and of rings, in order to remove this obstacle. This is joint work with Hendrik Lenstra.

I will describe joint work with Manjul Bhargava (Princeton) and Tom Fisher (Cambridge) in which we determine the probability that random equation from certain families  has a solution either locally (over the reals or the p-adics), everywhere locally,  or globally. Three kinds of equation will be considered: quadratics in any number of variables, ternary cubics and hyperelliptic quartics.

Some physical and mathematical theories have the unfortunate feature that if one takes them at face value, many quantities of interest appear to be infinite! Various techniques, usually going under the common name of “renormalisation” have been developed over the years to address this, allowing mathematicians and physicists to tame these infinities. We will tip our toes into some of the mathematical aspects of these techniques and we will see how they have recently been used to make precise analytical statements about the solutions of some equations whose meaning was not even clear until recently.

The theory of regularity structures allows one to give a meaning to several stochastic PDEs, including the Parabolic Anderson Model. So far, these equations have been considered on a torus. The goal of this talk is to explain how one can define the PAM on the whole space R^3. This is a joint work with Martin Hairer.

When solving Einstein's equations with negative cosmological constant, the natural setting is that of an initial-boundary value problem. Data is specified on the timelike conformal boundary as well as on some initial spacelike (or null) hypersurface. At the PDE level, one finds that the boundary data is typically prescribed on a surface at which the equations become singular and standard energy estimates break down. I will discuss how to handle this singularity by introducing a renormalisation procedure. I will also talk about the consequences of different choices of boundary conditions for solutions of Einstein’s equations with negative cosmological constant.