## Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Monday, November 30, 2009 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 269 , Maria Lopez , Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas Madrid, Spain , Organizer: Yingfei Yi
We introduce a change of coordinates allowing to capture in a fixed reference frame the profile of travelling wave solutions for nonlinear parabolic equations. For nonlinearities of bistable type the asymptotic travelling wave profile becomes an equilibrium state for the augmented reaction-diffusion equation. In the new equation, the profile of the asymptotic travelling front and its propagation speed emerge simultaneously as time evolves. Several numerical experiments illustrate the effciency of the method.
Series: Other Talks
Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 13:00 , Location: Skiles 255 , Matt Baker , School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech , Organizer: Matt Baker
We will state Serre's fundamental finiteness and vanishing results for the cohomology of coherent sheaves on a projective algebraic variety. As an application, we'll prove that the constant term of the Hilbert Polynomial does not depend on the projective embedding, a fact which is hard to understand using classical (non-cohomological) methods.
Monday, November 23, 2009 - 15:30 , Location: Skiles 255 , Anton Leykin , Georgia Tech , Organizer: Matt Baker
This talk will start with an introduction to the area of numerical algebraic geometry. The homotopy continuation algorithms that it currently utilizes are based on heuristics: in general their results are not certified. Jointly with Carlos Beltran, using recent developments in theoretical complexity analysis of numerical computation, we have implemented a practical homotopy tracking algorithm that provides the status of a mathematical proof to its approximate numerical output.
Monday, November 23, 2009 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 269 , , Mathematical Institute of Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic , Organizer: Thang Le
In 1979 Valiant gave algebraic analogs to algorithmic complexity problem such as $P \not = NP$. His central conjecture concerns the determinantal complexity of the permanents. In my lecture I shall propose geometric and algebraic methods to attack this problem and other lower bound problems based on the elusive functions approach by Raz. In particular I shall give new algorithms to get lower bounds for determinantal complexity of polynomials over $Q$, $R$ and $C$.
Monday, November 23, 2009 - 13:00 , Location: Skiles 255 , , Georgia Tech (School of ISyE) , , Organizer: Sung Ha Kang
Many algorithms were proposed in the past ten years on utilizing manifold structure for dimension reduction. Interestingly, many algorithms ended up with computing for eigen-subspaces. Applying theorems from matrix perturbation, we study the consistency and rate of convergence of some manifold-based learning algorithm. In particular, we studied local tangent space alignment (Zhang & Zha 2004) and give a worst-case upper bound on its performance. Some conjectures on the rate of convergence are made. It's a joint work with a former student, Andrew Smith.
Friday, November 20, 2009 - 15:05 , Location: Skiles 255 , Mark Ellingham , Vanderbilt University , Organizer: Xingxing Yu

Linkage involves finding a set of internally disjoint paths in a graph with specified endpoints. Given graphs G and H, we say G is H-linked if for every injective mapping f:V(H) -> V(G) we can find a subgraph H' of G which is a subdivision of H, with f(v) being the vertex of H' corresponding to each vertex v of H. We describe two results on H-linkage for small graphs H.

(1) Goddard showed that 4-connected planar triangulations are 4-ordered, or in other words C_4-linked. We strengthen this by showing that 4-connected planar triangulations are (K_4-e)-linked.

(2) Xingxing Yu characterized certain graphs related to P_4-linkage. We use his characterization to show that every 7-connected graph is P_4-linked, and to construct 6-connected graphs that are not P_4-linked.

This is joint work with Michael D. Plummer and Gexin Yu.

Friday, November 20, 2009 - 13:00 , Location: Skiles 255 , Huy Huynh , Georgia Tech , Organizer:
Let X_1, X_2,...,X_n be a sequence of i.i.d random variables with values in a finite alphabet {1,...,m}. Let LI_n be the length of the longest increasing subsequence of X_1,...,X_n. We shall express the limiting distribution of LI_n as functionals of m and (m-1)- dimensional Brownian motions as well as the largest eigenvalue of Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (GUE) matrix. Then I shall illustrate simulation study of these results
Series: PDE Seminar
Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 255 , Zhouping Xin , The Chinese University of Hong Kong , Organizer: Zhiwu Lin
One of the challenges in the study of transonic flows is the understanding of the flow behavior near the sonic state due to the severe degeneracy of the governing equations. In this talk, I will discuss the well-posedness theory of a degenerate free boundary problem for a quasilinear second elliptic equation arising from studying steady subsonic-sonic irrotational compressible flows in a convergent nozzle. The flow speed is sonic at the free boundary where the potential flow equation becomes degenerate. Both existence and uniqueness will be shown and optimal regularity will be obtained. Smooth transonic flows in deLaval nozzles will also be discussed. This is a joint work with Chunpeng Wang.
Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 269 , Lijian Yang , Michigan State University , Organizer:
Recently functional data analysis has received considerable attention in statistics research and a number of successful applications have been reported, but there has been no results on the inference of the global shape of the mean regression curve. In this paper, asymptotically simultaneous confidence band is obtained for the mean trajectory curve based on sparse longitudinal data, using piecewise constant spline estimation. Simulation experiments corroborate the asymptotic theory.
Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 12:05 , Location: Skiles 255 , Graham Brightwell , London School of Economics , Organizer: Robin Thomas
Several interesting models of random partial orders can be described via a process that builds the partial order one step at a time, at each point adding a new maximal element. This process therefore generates a linear extension of the partial order in tandem with the partial order itself. A natural condition to demand of such processes is that, if we condition on the occurrence of some finite partial order after a given number of steps, then each linear extension of that partial order is equally likely. This condition is called "order-invariance". The class of order-invariant processes includes processes generating a random infinite partial order, as well as those that amount to taking a random linear extension of a fixed infinite poset. Our goal is to study order-invariant processes in general. In this talk, I shall focus on some of the combinatorial problems that arise. (joint work with Malwina Luczak)