(Oxford University)

I will discuss three different constructions of smooth tori in S^4 whose complements have fundamental group Z: turned 1-twist-spun tori due to Boyle, the union of a ribbon disc with a genus one Seifert surface constructed by Cochran and Davis, and certain tori with four critical points. They are all topologically unknotted, but it is not known whether they are smoothly standard, except for tori with four critical points whose middle level set is a split link. The branched double cover of S^4 along any of these surfaces is a potentially exotic copy of S^2 x S^2, though, in the case of Boyle's example, it cannot be distinguished from the standard S^2 x S^2 using Seiberg-Witten invariants. This is joint work with Mark Powell.

The handlebody group is defined to be the mapping class group of a handelbody (rel. boundary). It is a subgroup of the mapping class group of the surface of the handlebody, and maps onto the outer automorphism group of its fundamental group (the free group of rank equal to its genus). 

Recently Hainaut and Petersen described a subspace of moduli space forming an orbifold classifying space for the handlebody group, and combined this with work of Chan-Galatius-Payne to construct cohomology classes in the group. I will talk about how one can build on their ideas to define a cocompact EG for the handlebody group inside Teichmüller space. This is a manifold with boundary and comes with a filtration by labelled disk systems which we call the `RGB (red-green-blue) disk complex.' I will describe this filtration, use it to describe the boundary of the manifold, and speculate about potential applications to duality results. Based on work-in-progress with Dan Petersen.

Bicommutant categories, initially invented for the purposes of Chern-Simons theory and 2d CFT, seem to also appear in other domains of math with examples related to group theory, and dynamical systems.

Involutive knot Floer homology, a refinement of knot Floer theory, is a powerful knot invariant which was used to solve several long-standing problems, including the one-is-not-enough result for 4-manifolds with boundary. In this talk, we show that if the involutive knot Floer homology of a knot K admits an invariant splitting, then the induced splitting if the knot Floer homology of P(K), for any pattern P, can be made invariant under its \iota_K involution. As an application, we construct an infinite family of examples of pairs of exotic contractible 4-manifolds which survive one stabilization, and observe that some of them are potential candidates for surviving two stabilizations.
 

One of the oldest open problems in representation theory is to classify the irreducible unitary representations of a semisimple Lie group G_R. Such representations play a fundamental role in harmonic analysis and the Langlands program and arise in physics as the state space of quantum mechanical systems in the presence of G_R-symmetry. Most unitary representations of G_R are realized, via some kind of induction, from unitary representations of proper Levi subgroups. Thus, the major obstacle to understanding the unitary dual of G_R is identifying the "non-induced" unitary representations of G_R. In previous joint work with Losev and Matvieievskyi, we have proposed a general construction of these non-induced representations, which we call "unipotent" representations of G_R. Unfortunately, the methods we employ do not provide a proof that these representations are unitary. In this talk, I will explain how one can apply Saito's theory of mixed Hodge modules to overcome this difficulty, giving a uniform proof of the unitarity of all unipotent representations. This is joint work in progress with Dougal Davis

Given two mathematical objects, the most basic question is whether they are the same. We will discuss this question for triangulations of three-manifolds. In practice there is fast software to answer this question and theoretically the problem is known to be decidable. However, our understanding is limited and known theoretical algorithms could have extremely long run-times. I will describe a programme to show that the 3-manifold homeomorphism problem is in the complexity class NP, and discuss the important sub-case of Seifert fibered spaces. 

In a classical work, Bowen and Margulis proved the equidistribution of
closed geodesics in any hyperbolic manifold. Together with Jeremy Kahn
and Vladimir Marković, we asked ourselves what happens in a
three-manifold if we replace curves by surfaces. The natural analog of a
closed geodesic is then a minimal surface, as totally geodesic surfaces
exist only very rarely. Nevertheless, it still makes sense (for various
reasons, in particular to ensure uniqueness of the minimal
representative) to restrict our attention to surfaces that are almost
totally geodesic.

The statistics of these surfaces then depend very strongly on how we
order them: by genus, or by area. If we focus on surfaces whose *area*
tends to infinity, we conjecture that they do indeed equidistribute; we
proved a partial result in this direction. If, however, we focus on
surfaces whose *genus* tends to infinity, the situation is completely
opposite: we proved that they then accumulate onto the totally geodesic
surfaces of the manifold (if there are any).

PhD_course_Roux_2.pdf

We will start from the description of a particle system modelling a finite size network of interacting neurons described by their voltage. After a quick description of the non-rigorous and rigorous mean-field limit results, we will do a detailed analytical study of the associated Fokker-Planck equation, which will be the occasion to introduce in context powerful general methods like the reduction to a free boundary Stefan-like problem, the relative entropy methods, the study of finite time blowup and the numerical and theoretical exploration of periodic solutions for the delayed version of the model. I will then present some variants and related models, like nonlinear kinetic Fokker-Planck equations and continuous systems of Fokker-Planck equations coupled by convolution.

PhD_course_Roux_1.pdf

We will start from the description of a particle system modelling a finite size network of interacting neurons described by their voltage. After a quick description of the non-rigorous and rigorous mean-field limit results, we will do a detailed analytical study of the associated Fokker-Planck equation, which will be the occasion to introduce in context powerful general methods like the reduction to a free boundary Stefan-like problem, the relative entropy methods, the study of finite time blowup and the numerical and theoretical exploration of periodic solutions for the delayed version of the model. I will then present some variants and related models, like nonlinear kinetic Fokker-Planck equations and continuous systems of Fokker-Planck equations coupled by convolution.

PhD_course_Roux.pdf

We will start from the description of a particle system modelling a finite size network of interacting neurons described by their voltage. After a quick description of the non-rigorous and rigorous mean-field limit results, we will do a detailed analytical study of the associated Fokker-Planck equation, which will be the occasion to introduce in context powerful general methods like the reduction to a free boundary Stefan-like problem, the relative entropy methods, the study of finite time blowup and the numerical and theoretical exploration of periodic solutions for the delayed version of the model. I will then present some variants and related models, like nonlinear kinetic Fokker-Planck equations and continuous systems of Fokker-Planck equations coupled by convolution.