C4

In this talk I will explain a category theoretic perspective on geometry.  Starting with a category of local objects (of and algebraic nature), and a (Grothendieck) 
topology on it, one can define global objects such as schemes and stacks. Examples of this  approach are algebraic, analytic, differential geometries and also more exotic geometries  such as analytic and differential geometry over the integers and analytic geometry over  the field with one element. In this approach the notion of a point is not primary but is  derived from the local to global structure. The Zariski and Huber spectra are recovered  in this way, and we also get new spectra which might be of interest in model theory.

I will present Pila's Modular Zilber-Pink with Derivatives (MZPD) conjecture, which is a Zilber-Pink type statement for the j-function and its derivatives, and discuss some weak and functional/differential analogues. In particular, I will define special varieties in each setting and explain the relationship between them. I will then show how one can prove the aforementioned weak/functional/differential MZPD statements using the Ax-Schanuel theorem for the j-function and its derivatives and some basic complex analytic geometry. Note that I gave a similar talk in Oxford last year (where I discussed a differential MZPD conjecture and proved it assuming an Existential Closedness conjecture for j), but this talk is going to be significantly different from that one (the approach presented in this talk will be mostly complex analytic rather than differential algebraic, and the results will be unconditional).

We investigate a nonlinear version of coevolving voter models, in which both node states and network structure update as a coupled stochastic dynamical process. Most prior work on coevolving voter models has focused on linear update rules with fixed rewiring and adopting probabilities. By contrast, in our nonlinear version, the probability that a node rewires or adopts is a function of how well it "fits in" within its neighborhood. To explore this idea, we incorporate a parameter σ that represents the fraction of neighbors of an updating node that share its opinion state. In an update, with probability σq (for some nonlinearity parameter q), the updating node rewires; with complementary probability 1−σq, the updating node adopts a new opinion state. We study this mechanism using three rewiring schemes: after an updating node deletes a discordant edge, it then either (1) "rewires-to-random" by choosing a new neighbor in a random process; (2) "rewires-to-same" by choosing a new neighbor in a random process from nodes that share its state; or (3) "rewires-to-none" by not rewiring at all (akin to "unfriending" on social media). We compare our nonlinear coevolving model to several existing linear models, and we find in our model that initial network topology can play a larger role in the dynamics, whereas the choice of rewiring mechanism plays a smaller role. A particularly interesting feature of our model is that, under certain conditions, the opinion state that is initially held by a minority of nodes can effectively spread to almost every node in a network if the minority nodes views themselves as the majority. In light of this observation, we relate our results to recent work on the majority illusion in social networks.

Reference: 

Kureh, Yacoub H., and Mason A. Porter. "Fitting In and Breaking Up: A Nonlinear Version of Coevolving Voter Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11608 (2019).

In 1996 using techniques from model theory and intersection theory, Hrushovski obtained a generalisation of the Lang-Weil estimates. Subsequently the estimates have found applications in group theory, algebraic dynamics and algebraic geometry. We shall discuss a geometric proof of the non-uniform version of these estimates.

I will give an introduction to the theory of definable parameterization of definable sets in the o-minimal context and its application to diophantine problems. I will then go on to discuss uniformity issues with particular reference to the subanalytic case. This is joint work with Jonathan Pila and Raf Cluckers

Short- and long-term memories are distinguished by their forgettability. Most of what we perceive and store is lost rather quickly to noise, as new sensations replace older ones, while some memories last for as long as we live. Synaptic dynamics is key to the process of memory storage; in this talk I will discuss a few approaches we have taken to this problem, culminating in a model of synaptic networks containing both cooperative and competitive dynamics. It turns out that the competitionbetween synapses is key to the natural emergence of long-term memory in this model, as in reality.

References
​Mehta, Anita. "Storing and retrieving long-term memories: cooperation and competition in synaptic dynamics." Advances in Physics: X 3.1 (2018): 1480415.

In the spirit of the Ax-Kochen-Ershov principle, one could conjecture that the imaginaries in equicharacteristic zero Henselian fields can be entirely classified in terms of the Haskell-Hrushovski-Macpherson geometric imaginaries, residue field imaginaries and value group imaginaries. However, the situation is more complicated than that. My goal in this talk will be to present what we believe to be an optimal conjecture and give elements of a proof.

Topological quantum field theories (TQFTs) are an extensively studied scheme for constructing invariants of manifolds, inspired by physics. In this talk, we will discuss a particular flavour of TQFT, where we equip our manifolds with principal bundles for some finite group. After introducing TQFTs and this particular flavour, I will discuss games one can play with these TQFTs, and a possible strategy for classifying equivariant TQFTs in three dimensions. 

A cohomology class on the diffeomorphism group Diff(M) of a manifold M

can be thought of as a characteristic class for smooth M-bundles.
I will survey a technique for producing examples of such classes,
and then explain how the signature (of 4-manifolds) provides an
obstruction to this technique in dimension 3.

I will define Miller-Morita-Mumford classes and explain how we can
think of them as coming from classes on the cobordism category.
Madsen and Weiss showed that for a surface S of genus g all cohomology
classes
of the mapping class group MCG(S) (of degree < 2(g-2)/3) are MMM-classes.
This technique has been successfully ported to higher even dimensions d= 2n,
but it cannot possibly work in odd dimensions:
a theorem of Ebert says that for d=3 all MMM-classes are trivial.
In the second part of my talk I will sketch a new proof of (a part of)
Ebert's theorem.
I first recall the definition of the signature sign(W) of a 4 manifold W,
and some of its properties, such as additivity with respect to gluing.
Using the signature and an idea from the world of 1-2-3-TQFTs,
I then go on to define a 'central extension' of the three dimensional
cobordism category.
This central extension corresponds to a 2-cocycle on the 3d cobordism
category,
and we will see that the construction implies that the associated MMM-class
has to vanish on all 3-dimensional manifold bundles.