This Week's Seminars and Colloquia

From Optics to the Deift Conjecture

Series
Job Candidate Talk
Time
Monday, February 17, 2025 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Rowan KillipUCLA

After providing a mathematical background for some curious optical experiments in the 19th century, I will then describe how these ideas inform our understanding of the Deift conjecture for the Korteweg--de Vries equation. Specifically, in joint work with Chapouto and Visan, we showed that the evolution of almost-periodic initial data need not remain almost periodic.

 

Recent progress on completely integrable systems

Series
Job Candidate Talk
Time
Tuesday, February 18, 2025 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Monica VisanUCLA

 We will survey a number of recent developments in the theory of completely integrable nonlinear dispersive PDE.  These include a priori bounds, orbital stability of multisolitons, well-posedness at optimal regularity, and the existence of dynamics for Gibbs distributed initial data. I will describe the basic objects that tie together these disparate results, as well as the diverse ideas required for each problem.

 

 

ε-series by Caleb McFarland, Richter Jordaan, Owen Huang

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Tuesday, February 18, 2025 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker

 

Caleb McFarland: We prove a structure theorem for Γ-labeled graphs G which forbid a fixed Γ-labeled graph H as an immersion in the case that Γ is a finite abelian group. Joint work with Rose McCarty and Paul Wollan.
Richter Jordaan: In this expository talk I will give introduce an approach to the cycle double cover based on the more general problem of finding specific cycle covers of cubic graphs. After stating the basics of the cycle double cover conjecture and structure of a minimal counterexample, I'll try to describe the setup and basic intuition behind how the general cyle cover problem could be used to approach the cycle double cover conjecture.
Owen Huang: We will discuss some recent work with Rose McCarty concerning the product structure of Cayley graphs. We also introduce an integer-valued invariant of finitely generated groups and note its relevance in geometric group theory. 

Cylindrical Martingale-Valued Measures, Stochastic Integration and SPDEs

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Wednesday, February 19, 2025 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Dario MenaUniversity of Costa Rica

We develop a theory of Hilbert-space valued stochastic integration with respect to cylindrical martingale-valued measures. As part of our construction, we expand the concept of quadratic variation, to the case of cylindrical martingale-valued measures that are allowed to have discontinuous paths; this is carried out within the context of separable Banach spaces. Our theory of stochastic integration is applied to address the existence and uniqueness of solutions to stochastic partial differential equations in Hilbert spaces. 

Hamilton-Jacobi equations on Wasserstein spaces

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Wednesday, February 19, 2025 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Ben SeegerUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Please note the unusual time and place.

The study of differential equations on infinite spaces of probability measures has become an active field of research in recent years. Such equations arise when describing nonlinear effects in systems with a large number of interacting particles or agents. A rigorous well-posedness theory for such equations then leads to results about large deviations for interacting particle systems, limiting statements about free energies in mean field spin glasses, and mean field descriptions in high-dimensional optimization and game theory, among many other examples.
 
This talk will give an overview of some recent well-posedness results for Hamilton-Jacobi equations on probablity spaces. The nonlinear and infinite-dimensional nature of the underlying space necessitates a mix of techniques from functional analysis and probability theory. We also discuss how these PDE techniques can be used to deduce qualitative and quantitative convergence results for stochastic control and differential games for a large system of interacting agents. This talk is based on joint work with Joe Jackson (University of Chicago) and Samuel Daudin (Université Paris Cité, Laboratoire Jacques Louis Lions).

Approximate Messaging Passing Algorithms for High-dimensional Estimation and Inference

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, February 20, 2025 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Cynthia RushColumbia University

In this talk, I discuss how one can use approximate message passing (AMP) algorithms — a class of efficient, iterative algorithms that have been successfully employed in many statistical learning tasks like high-dimensional linear regression and low-rank matrix estimation — for characterizing exact statistical properties of estimators in a high-dimensional asymptotic regime, where the sample size of the data is proportional to the number of parameters in the problem. As a running example, we will study sorted L1 penalization (SLOPE) for linear regression and show how AMP theory can be used to give insights on the variable selection properties of this estimator by characterizing the optimal trade-off between measures of type I and type II error. Collaborators on this work include Zhiqi Bu, Oliver Feng, Jason Klusowski, Richard Samworth, Weijie Su, Ramji Venkataramanan, and Ruijia Wu.

Interpolating between the optimal transport problems of Monge and Kantorovich

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, February 21, 2025 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Brendan PassUniversity of Alberta

I will present joint work in progress with Gero Friesecke.  We introduce a two parameter family of variational problems; varying the first parameter interpolates between a regularized version of Monge's optimal transport (OT) problem and Kantorovich's relaxed version.  The first limit problem has the advantage over Monge's original problem of always admitting a solution.  In cases where a (sufficiently regular) Monge map exists, the solution will be of such a form; if not, the limit problem essentially minimizes the transportation cost among all best approximations of the target measure by  pushforwards of the source.  When the source measure is discrete, we show that this is equivalent to the optimal quantization of the target measure, with the additional constraint that the weights of the approximating discrete masses are prescribed.  The second parameter controls the regularity of the pseudo-Monge map. In both the high and low regularity limits, the problem converges to the classical Kantorovich problem, under mild assumptions.

 

Part of the motivation for this problem is to understand whether the strictly correlated electron ansatz is valid in the semi-classical limit of density functional theory (DFT).  We will briefly discuss the corresponding application of OT to DFT, and outline what is known about the existence of Monge solutions (or, equivalently, the validity of the strictly correlated electron ansatz).

The independence number of H-free hypergraphs

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Friday, February 21, 2025 - 15:15 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Xiaoyu HeGeorgia Institute of Technology

It is a fundamental question in Ramsey theory to determine the smallest possible independence number of an H-free hypergraph on n vertices. In the case of graphs, the problem was famously solved for H=K3 by Kim and for H=K4 (up to a logarithmic factor) by Mattheus-Verstraete in 2023. Even C4 and K5 remain wide open. We study the problem for 3-uniform hypergraphs and conjecture a full classification: the minimum independence number is poly(n) if and only if H is contained in the iterated blowup of the single-edge hypergraph. We prove this conjecture for all H with at most two tightly connected components. Based on joint work with Conlon, Fox, Gunby, Mubayi, Suk, Verstraete, and Yu.