Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A recent lower bound on the number of edges in a k-critical n-vertex graph by Kostochka and Yancey yields a half-page proof of the celebrated Grotzsch Theorem that every planar triangle-free graph is 3-colorable. We use the same bound to give short proofs of other known theorems on 3-coloring of planar graphs, among whose is the Grunbaum-Aksenov Theorem that every planar with at most three triangles is 3-colorable. We also prove the new result that every graph obtained from a triangle-free planar graph by adding a vertex of degree at most four is 3-colorable. Joint work with O. Borodin, A. Kostochka and M. Yancey.

We study the ordinary differential equation \varepsilon \ddot x + \dot x + \varepsilon g(x) = \e f(\omega t), with f and g analytic and f quasi-periodic in t with frequency vector \omega\in\mathds{R}^{d}. We show that if there exists c_{0}\in\mathds{R} such that g(c_{0}) equals the average of f and the first non-zero derivative of g at c_{0} is of odd order \mathfrak{n}, then, for \varepsilon small enough and under very mild Diophantine conditions on \omega, there exists a quasi-periodic solution "response solution" close to c_{0}, with the same frequency vector as f. In particular if f is a trigonometric polynomial the Diophantine condition on \omega can be completely removed. Moreover we show that for \mathfrak{n}=1 such a solution depends analytically on \e in a domain of the complex plane tangent more than quadratically to the imaginary axis at the origin. These results have been obtained in collaboration with Roberto Feola (Universit\`a di Roma ``La Sapienza'') and Guido Gentile (Universit\`a di Roma Tre).

We derive discrete norm representations associated with projections of interpolation spaces onto finite dimensional subspaces. These norms are products of integer and non integer powers of the Gramian matrices associated with the generating pair of spaces for the interpolation space. We include a brief description of some of the algorithms which allow the efficient computation of matrix powers. We consider in some detail the case of fractional Sobolev spaces both for positive and negative indices together with applications arising in preconditioning techniques. Several other applications are described.

Thurston's gluing equations are polynomial equations invented byThurston to explicitly compute hyperbolic structures or, more generally, representations in PGL(2,C). This is done via so called shape coordinates.We generalize the shape coordinates to obtain a parametrization ofrepresentations in PGL(n,C). We give applications to quantum topology, anddiscuss an intriguing duality between the shape coordinates and thePtolemy coordinates of Garoufalidis-Thurston-Zickert. The shapecoordinates and Ptolemy coordinates can be viewed as 3-dimensional analogues of the X- and A-coordinates on higher Teichmuller spaces due toFock and Goncharov.