Past Events

The Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) surface, formally defined as a 2-dimensional Riemannian manifold with conformal factor being the exponentiation of a Gaussian free field, is closely related to random planar geometry as well as scaling limits of...

Drug overdose deaths continue to increase in the United States, reaching a record of more than 100,000 deaths in 2021, driven mostly by fentanyl and methamphetamines. We propose a mathematical framework to describe the neurobiology of drug addiction...

Generalizing the original Chebyshev bias can go in many directions: one can adapt the setting to virtually any equidistribution result encoded by a finite number of L-functions. In this talk, we will discuss what happens when one needs an infinite...

Skeletal muscle is the motor that drives human and animal movement; however, our understanding of how muscle performs this function is limited because of challenges in directly measuring muscle deformation and force output in living beings. In this...

In this talk, I will discuss certain extremal configurations in Q-polynomial distance-regular graphs (or P- and Q-polynomial association schemes), which we call descendents. The descendents of a hypercube are precisely its faces. I will show how they...

The rational points of an abelian variety form a finitely generated group and computing the rank of this group is a hard and central problem in arithmetic geometry. One method, which follows the original proof of Mordell and Weil of the finiteness of...

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the standard optimization method for training machine learning (ML) models. SGD requires a step-size that depends on unknown problem-dependent quantities, and the choice of this step-size heavily influences the...

Peter Borewein empirically discovered quite a number of mysteries involving sign patterns of coefficients of polynomials of the form $f_{p,s,n}(q):=\prod_{j=0}^{n} \prod_{k=1}^{p-1} (1-q^{pj+k})^{s}$ ($p$ a prime and $s,n \in \mathbb{N}$). In the...

Structural Ramsey theory generalizes classical Ramsey theory by considering classes of finite sets with additional structure (such as finite groups or finite partial orders) and colourings of their substructures. When the class satisfies an...

Around 2008, Schramm conjectured that the critical probability pc of a transitive graph is entirely determined by the local geometry of the graph, subject to the global constraint that pc1. In other words, if Gn is a sequence of transitive graphs...