C2

Transportation cost spaces are of high theoretical interest,  and they also are fundamental in applications in many areas of applied mathematics, engineering, physics, computer science, finance, and social sciences. 

Obtaining low distortion embeddings of transportation cost spaces into L_1 became important in the problem of finding nearest points, an important research subject in theoretical computer science. After introducing

these spaces we will present some results on upper  and lower estimates of the distortion of embeddings of Transportation Cost Spaces into L_1

The notion of biexactness for groups was introduced by Ozawa in 2004 and has since become a major tool used for studying solidity of von Neumann algebras. We introduce the notion of biexactness for von Neumann algebras, which allows us to place many previous solidity results in a more systematic context, and naturally leads to extensions of these results. We will also discuss examples of solid factors that are not biexact. This is a joint work with Jesse Peterson.

In the world of von Neumann algebras, the factors that do not have a trace, the so-called type III factors, are the most difficult to study. Some of their key structural properties are still not well-understood. In this talk, I will give a gentle introduction to Connes's Bicentralizer Problem, which is the most important open problem in the theory of type III factors. I will then present some recent progress on this problem and its applications.

I will present novel freeness results in ultraproducts of tracial von Neumann algebras. As a particular case, I will show that if a and b are the generators of the free group F_2, then the relative commutants of a and b in the ultraproduct of the free group factor are free with respect to the ultraproduct trace. The proof is based on a surprising application of Lp-boundedness results of Fourier multipliers in free group factors for p > 2. I will describe applications of these results to absorption and model theory of II_1 factors. This is joint work with Adrian Ioana.

This talk concerns some ideas around the question of when a *-homomorphism into a quotient C*-algebra lifts. Lifting of *-homomorphisms arises prominently in the notions of projectivity and semiprojectivity, which in turn are closely related to stability of relations. Blackadar recently defined the notions of l-open and l-closed C*-algebras, making use of the topological space of *-homomorphisms from a C*-algebra A to another C*-algebra B, with the point-norm topology. I will discuss these properties and present new characterizations of them, which lead to solutions of some problems posed by Blackadar. This is joint work with Dolapo Oyetunbi.

Results from a few years ago of Kennedy and Schafhauser attempt to characterize the simplicity of reduced crossed products, under an assumption which they call vanishing obstruction. 

However, this is a strong condition that often fails, even in cases of finite groups acting on finite dimensional C*-algebras. In this work, we give complete C*-dynamical characterization, of when the crossed product is simple, in the setting of FC-hypercentral groups. 

This is a large class of amenable groups that, in the finitely-generated setting, is known to coincide with the set of groups with polynomial growth.

We discuss Connes’ quantized calculus on quantum tori and Euclidean spaces, as applications of the recent development of noncommutative analysis.
This talk is based on a joint work in progress with Xiao Xiong and Kai Zeng.
 

I will give an introduction to quasidiagonality of group actions wherein an action on a C^*-algebra is approximated by actions on matrix algebras.  This has implications for crossed product C^*-algebras, especially as pertains to finite dimensional approximation.  I'll sketch the proof that all isometric actions are quasidiagonal, which we can view as a dynamical Petr-Weyl theorem.  Then I will discuss an interplay between quasidiagonal actions and semiprojectivity of C^*-algebras, a property that allows "almost representations" to be perturbed to honest ones.  

To every action of a discrete group on a compact Hausdorff space one can canonically associate a C*-algebra, called the crossed product. The crossed product construction is an extremely popular one, and there are numerous results in the literature that describe the structure of this C* algebra in terms of the dynamical system. In this talk, we will focus on one of the central notions in the realm of the classification of simple, nuclear C*-algebras, namely Jiang-Su stability. We will review the existing results and report on the most recent progress in this direction, going beyond the case of free actions both for amenable and nonamenable groups. 

Parts of this talk are joint works with Geffen, Kranz, and Naryshkin, and with Geffen, Gesing, Kopsacheilis, and Naryshkin. 

The (finite) Hilbert matrix is arguably one of the single most well-known matrices in mathematics. The infinite Hilbert matrix H was introduced by David Hilbert around 120 years ago in connection with his double series theorem. It can be interpreted as a linear operator on spaces of analytic functions by its action on their Taylor coefficients. The boundedness of H on the Hardy spaces H^p for 1 < p < ∞ and Bergman spaces A^p for 2 < p < ∞ was established by Diamantopoulos and Siskakis. The exact value of the operator norm of H acting on the Bergman spaces A^p for 4 ≤ p < ∞ was shown to be π /sin(2π/p) by Dostanic, Jevtic and Vukotic in 2008. The case 2 < p < 4 was an open problem until in 2018 it was shown by Bozin and Karapetrovic that the norm has the same value also on the scale2 < p < 4. In this talk, we introduce some background, review some of the old results, and consider the still partly open problem regarding the value of the norm on weighted Bergman spaces. We also consider a generalised Hilbert matrix operator and its (essential) norm. The talk is partly based on a joint work with Mikael Lindström, David Norrbo, and Niklas Wikman (Åbo Akademi University).