## Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Friday, June 22, 2018 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , Chen Xu , Georgia Tech , , Organizer: Chen Xu
We will present three results in percolation and sequence analysis. In the first part, we will briefly show an exponential concentration inequality for transversal fluctuation of directed last passage site percolation. In the the second part, we will dive into the power lower bounds for all the r-th central moments ($r\ge1$) of the last passage time of directed site perolcation on a thin box. In the last part, we will partially answer a conjecture raised by Bukh and Zhou that the minimal expected length of the longest common subsequences between two i.i.d. random permutations with arbitrary distribution on the symmetric group is obtained when the distribution is uniform and thus lower bounded by $c\sqrt{n}$ by showing that some distribution can be iteratively constructed such that it gives strictly smaller expectation than uniform distribution and a quick cubic root of $n$ lower bound will also be shown.
Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - 12:30 , Location: Skiles 005 , Marcel Celaya , Georgia Tech , Organizer: Sudipta Kolay
Inkscape is an powerful open-source drawing program suitable for making figures for your math papers and lectures. In this talk I will discuss some of the useful tricks and features that you can take advantage of in this software, as well as some things to avoid. This will be a live demonstration talk, please bring a laptop if you can.
Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - 10:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , Shane Scott , Georgia Tech , , Organizer: Shane Scott
The curve complex of Harvey allows combinatorial representation of a surface mappingclass group by describing its action on simple closed curves. Similar complexes of spheres,free factors, and free splittings allow combinatorial representation of the automorphisms ofa free group. We consider a Birman exact sequence for combinatorial models of mappingclass groups and free group automorphisms. We apply this and other extension techniquesto compute the automorphism groups of several simplicial complexes associated with map-ping class groups and automorphisms of free groups.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018 - 15:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , , University of Rennes , Organizer: Mayya Zhilova
Random balls models are collections of Euclidean balls whose centers and radii are generated by a Poisson point process. Such collections model various contexts ranging from imaging to communication network. When the distributions driving the centers and the radii are heavy-tailed, interesting interference phenomena occurs when the model is properly zoomed-out. The talk aims to illustrate such phenomena and to give an overview of the asymptotic behavior of functionals of interest. The limits obtained include in particular stable fields, (fractional) Gaussian fields and Poissonian bridges. Related questions will also be discussed.
Saturday, June 9, 2018 - 15:05 , Location: Skiles 005 , Esther Ezra , Georgia Tech , Organizer: Prasad Tetali
Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - 15:30 , Location: Skiles 006 , Sarah Koch , U Michigan , Organizer: Dan Margalit
Given two complex polynomials, we can try to mathematically paste them together to obtain a rational function through a procedure known as mating the polynomials. In this talk, we will begin by trying to understand the "shape" of complex polynomials in general. We will then discuss the mating of two quadratic polynomials: we explore examples where the mating does exist, and examples where it does not. There will be lots of movies and exploration in this talk.
Wednesday, May 30, 2018 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Tongzhou Chen , GT Math , Organizer: Jiaqi Yang
We model and analyze the dynamics of religious group membership and size. A groups is distinguished by its strictness, which determines how much time group members are expected to spend contributing to the group. Individuals differ in their rate of return for time spent outside of their religious group. We construct a utility function that individ- uals attempt to maximize, then find a Nash Equilibrium for religious group participation with a heterogeneous population. We then model dynamics of group size by including birth, death, and switching of individuals between groups. Group switching depends on the strictness preferences of individuals and their probability of encountering members of other groups.
Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Bulent Tosun , University of Alabama , Organizer: John Etnyre

This will be a 90 minute seminar

It is well known that all contact 3-manifolds can be obtained from the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere by contact surgery on a Legendrian link. Hence, an interesting and much studied question asks what properties are preserved under various types of contact surgeries. The case for the negative contact surgeries is fairly well understood. In this talk, we will discuss some new results about positive contact surgeries and in particular completely characterize when contact r surgery is symplectically/Stein fillable when r is in (0,1]. This is joint work with James Conway and John Etnyre.
Series: PDE Seminar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , , Missouri University of Science and Technology , , Organizer:
The ground state solution to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) is a global, non-scattering solution that often provides a threshold between scattering and blowup.  In this talk, we will discuss new, simplified proofs of scattering below the ground state threshold (joint with B. Dodson) in both the radial and non-radial settings.
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , , Georgia Tech , , Organizer:
Understanding contact structures on hyperbolic 3-manifolds is one of the major open problems in the area of contact topology. As a first step, we try to classify tight contact structures on a specific hyperbolic 3-manifold. In this talk, we will review the previous classification results and classify tight contact structures on the Weeks manifold, which has the smallest hyperbolic volume. Finally, we will discuss how to generalize this method to classify tight contact structures on some other hyperbolic 3-manifolds.