Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A Frontiers in Science Lecture by Lance Fortnow, Chair of the School of Computer Science

What is computer science? Ask Google or Alexa, and you'll get an answer like "the study of the principles and use of computers." That doesn't really capture the breadth of the field.

But how can you get an answer in a fraction of a second? Now that's computer science!

Lance Fortnow will explore

• the ideas developed by computer scientists that transport your Google query to the cloud 
• how the cloud keeps track of the massive amount of information needed to answer the question 
• how algorithms and machine learning figure out what your question means and how best to respond 

All these take place in that six-tenths of a second from the time you make the query until answers magically appear, while keeping your information secure and private all the time. 

About the Speaker
Lance Fortnow is professor and chair of the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on computational complexity and its applications to economic theory.

Fortnow received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, under the supervision of the theoretical computer scientist Michael Sipser. Before joining Georgia Tech in 2012, Fortnow was a professor at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, a senior research scientist at the NEC Research Institute, and a one-year visitor at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI; National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) and the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Since 2007, Fortnow has held an adjoint professorship at the Toyota Technological Institute, in Chicago.

Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its applications, most recently to microeconomic theory. His work on interactive proof systems and time-space lower bounds for satisfiability have led to his election as a 2007 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow. Fortnow was a National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow from 1992 to 1998 and a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1996-97.

Among his many activities, Fortnow has served as the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transaction on Computation Theory, as chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), and as member of the Computing Research Association board of directors. He served as chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity from 2000 to 2006.

Fortnow originated and has coauthored the Computational Complexity weblog since 2002, the first major theoretical computer science blog. He has thousands of followers on Twitter. 

Fortnow's survey "The Status of the P versus NP Problem" is the most downloaded article of the journal Communications of the ACM. Fortnow has written the popular science book "The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the Search for the Impossible," which is loosely based on that article.

Book signing follows the lecture. 

About Frontiers in Science Lectures
Lectures in this series are intended to inform, engage, and inspire students, faculty, staff, and the public on developments, breakthroughs, and topics of general interest in the sciences and mathematics. Lecturers tailor their talks for nonexpert audiences.

SoM and CTL Awards:

Top Graduate Student Award 2018:  Mark Bolding

Festa Fellowship Award 2018:  George Kerchev

Outstanding TA Award 2018:  Xin Wang & Yuze Zhang

Best PhD Thesis 2018:  Yan Wang

Bob Price Travel Fellowship 2018:  Marc Haerkoenen, Sudipta Kolay, Sergio Mayorga, Stephen McKean, Youngho Yoo, Xiaofan Yuan.

CTL/BP Outstanding Grad TA Nominee 2018: Ben Ide

CTL/BP Outstanding Grad Instructor Nominee 2018: Alex Hoyer

-------------------------------------------

Georgia Tech GTA of the Year Award: Ben Ide,  
Georgia Tech UTA of the Year: Markace Rainey.

A School of Mathematics Seminar with IBM Research puzzlemaster Oded Margalit

IBM Research runs a mathematical challenge site, called "Ponder This." Every month the site posts a new  challenge and reveals the solution for the previous month's riddle. Oded Margalit has been the puzzlemaster since 2005.  He will survey some of the riddles over the years and tell some anecdotes about the challenges and the solvers, for example: 

• PRL paper born from a riddle on random walks 
• ITA-2014 paper on water hose model (using quantum entanglement to break location based encryption)
• Games: 2048, Kakuro, Infinite chess game, the probability of a backgammon to end with a double Fisher Foul Chess and more 
• Minimal hash function 
• Combinatorial test design 
• A solver from the intensive care unit and other stories 
• Finding a natural number n such that round ((1+2 cos(20))^n) is divisible by 10^9

Don't worry! No high mathematics knowledge is assumed.

A Frontiers in Science lecture by Ernő Rubik, inventor of the Rubik's Cube

In a rare public appearance, Ernő Rubik will give a public lecture, discussing a wide range of topics including design and architecture, the role of curiosity in the human condition, and his perspective on more than four decades of the Rubik's Cube.

About the Speaker
Ernő Rubik is an architect and designer. He lives in Budapest, Hungary, where he invented Rubik’s Cube in 1974.

Rubik co-founded the Hungarian Academy of Engineering; the Palace of Wonders, a science center in Budapest; and the Aquincum Institute of Technology. He has served as juror for the European Inventor Awards and as Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation of the European Commission.

Among numerous national and international distinctions, Rubik is the recipient of Liberty Science Center's Genius Prize; the USA Science & Engineering Festival Medal; and Hungary's highest state distinction, the Order of St. Stephen.

This talk is sponsored by the College of Science, the School of Mathematics, and the Gathering 4 Gardner Foundation.

About Frontiers in Science Lectures 
Lectures in this series are intended to inform, engage, and inspire students, faculty, staff and the public on developments, breakthroughs, and topics of general interest in the sciences and mathematics. Lecturers tailor their talks for nonexpert audiences

The School of Math welcomes high school students from the Atlanta area to compete for pride and prizes in a day of mathematics and fun.

Improv comedy with a science twist!

Scientists, improvisation artists, and the audience combine to show the lighter side of science and life in the lab through short improv games and sketches.

Featuring Georgia Tech mathematician Lew Lefton.

Taste of Science is one of many Georgia Tech events at the 2018 Atlanta Science Festival.

Featuring live demonstrations, food samples, and fascinating facts that tie science, culture, and food together, the Taste of Science is sure to satisfy your appetite for learning.

Hosted by College of Sciences’ Ed Greco, Michael Evans, Jennifer Leavey, Enid Steinbart, and their students in students in the STEMcomm VIP class.

School of Mathematics' 2018 Stelson Lecture, by Jill C. Pipher, Brown University

How is it possible to send encrypted information across an insecure channel (like the internet) so that only the intended recipient can decode it, without sharing the secret key in advance?

In 1976, well before this question arose, a new mathematical theory of encryption (public-key cryptography) invented by Diffie and Hellman made digital commerce and finance possible. The technology advances of the last 20 years bring new and urgent problems, including the need to compute on encrypted data in the cloud and to have cryptography that can withstand the speed-ups of quantum computers.

In this lecture, Jill Pipher will discuss some of the history of cryptography and some of the latest ideas in "lattice" cryptography which, appear to be quantum resistant and efficient 

RECEPTION FOLLOWS THE STELSON LECTURE

About the Speaker

Jill C. Pipher is Vice President for Research and Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. 

She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the president-elect of the American Mathematical Society and the first director of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research.

Pipher taught at the University of Chicago before taking a position at Brown, where she served as chair of the Mathematics Department from 2005 to 2008.

Her research areas are harmonic analysis, Fourier analysis, partial differential equations, and cryptography. She has published more than 50 research articles and has coauthored a textbook on cryptography. 

Jill Pipher will deliver a colloquium on "Non-Smooth Boundary Value Problems" on Friday, March 2, 2018, 11 AM, in Room 006, Skiles Building, 686 Cherry St NW, Atlanta, GA 30313.

About the Stelson Lecture Series
The series is made possible by an endowment created in 1988 by Thomas Stelson in honor of his father, Hugh Stelson. Thomas Stelson was a distinguished civil engineer who served Georgia Tech in high leadership positions from 1971 to 1990. Hugh Stelson was a mathematician who worked on problems related to interest rates, annuities, and numerical analysis. Lecturers invited for this series are first-rate mathematicians who are gifted speakers. Stelson lecturers give a public lecture for a general audience, as well as a colloquium for mathematicians and experts in related disciplines.   

Jill C. Pipher, Vice President for Research and Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University will give the Stelson Lecture at Georgia Tech on March 1, 2018, 6:00-7:00 PM • Klaus Lecture Auditorium 1443, with a reception to follow at 7:00 PM.

See also the CoS story here:

http://www.cos.gatech.edu/hg/item/602067

Abstract for Stelson Lecture

How is it possible to send encrypted information across an insecure channel (like the internet) so that only the intended recipient can decode it, without sharing the secret key in advance? In 1976, well before this question arose, a new mathematical theory of encryption (public-key cryptography) was invented by Diffie and Hellman, which made digital commerce and finance possible. The technology advances of the last twenty years bring new and urgent problems, including the need to compute on encrypted data in the cloud and to have cryptography that can withstand the speed-ups of quantum computers. In this lecture, we will discuss some of the history of cryptography, as well as some of the latest ideas in "lattice" cryptography which appear to be quantum resistant and efficient 

There will also be a Colloquium on Friday, March 2, 2018, at 11:00 AM in Skiles room 006.

Title: Non-smooth boundary value problems

The regularity properties of solutions to linear partial differential equations in domains depend on the structure of the equation, the degree of smoothness of the coefficients of the equation, and the boundary of the domain. Quantifying this dependence is a classical problem, and modern techniques can answer some of these questions with remarkable precision. For both physical and theoretical reasons, it is important to consider partial differential equations with non-smooth coefficients. We’ll discuss how some classical tools in harmonic and complex analysis have played a central role in answering questions in this subject at the interface of harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. 

About the speaker:

Jill Pipher is the Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor Mathematics at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the president-elect of the American Mathematical Society and she was the first director of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research. She taught at the University of Chicago before taking a position at Brown, where she served as chair of the Mathematics Department from 2005 to 2008. Her work has been in harmonic analysis, Fourier analysis, partial differential equations, and cryptography. She has published more than 50 research articles and has coauthored a textbook on cryptography. 

The workshop is a part of GTMAP activities of  the thematic semester on Control (Spring 2018). 

This is a half day workhop on a panorama of mathematical questions in Dynamics and Control, presented by some people in the school of Mathematics and Physics.

2-2:30 Howie Weiss on "Collateral sensitivity of antibiotic-resistant microbes: Modeling insights informing in-vitro studies"

2:30-3 Predrag Cvitanovic  on "A spatiotemporal theory of turbulence : computational approaches"

3-3:30 Luca Dieci on "Periodic orbits of planar discontinuous systems under discretization"

3:30- 4 BREAK

4-4:30 Federico Bonetto on "Nash Equilibria in Decentralized Economies with Fiat Money"

4:30-5 Haomin Zhou on "A Brief Introduction to Optimal Transport on Finite Graphs"

Prof. Howie Weiss (GT Math,   Emory Biology and Public Health)

Title: Collateral sensitivity of antibiotic-resistant microbes: Modeling insights informing in-vitro studies

Abstract:  Antibiotics have greatly reduced the morbidity and mortality due to  infectious diseases. Antibiotic resistance constitutes a significant threat to human health. One strategy to help combat resistance is to find novel ways to use existing drugs, even those that display high  rates of resistance. For some species,  pairs of antibiotics have been identified for which evolution of resistance to drug A increases sensitivity to drug B and visa versa. These research groups have proposed cycling such pairs to treat infections, and similar treatment  strategies are being investigated to treat various cancer forms as well.

While an exciting treatment prospect, no cycling experiments have yet been performed with consideration of pharmacokinetics (PK) and pharmacodynamics (PD). To test the plausibility of this scheme and search for ways to optimize it, we create a mathematical model with explicit PK-PD considerations. We study several possible treatment protocols using pairs of collaterally sensitive antibiotics, and investigate the speed of ascent of multiply resistant mutants.

Prof. Predrag Cvitanovic (GT Physics)

Title: A spatiotemporal theory of turbulence : computational approaches

Abstract: The recurrent flows observed in moderate Reynolds number turbulence are shaped by close passes to unstable invariant solutions of Navier-Stokes equations. While in recent years many such solutions  been computed, so far all have been confined to small computational domains.

Pipe, channel and plane flows, however, are flows on infinite spatial domains. If the Navier-Stokes equations are recast as a space-time theory, with both space and time taken to infinity, the traditional Direct Numerical Simulation codes have to be abandoned.  In this theory there is no time, there is only a repertoire of admissible spatiotemporal patterns. To determine these, radically  different kinds of codes will have to be written, with space and time treated on equal footing: some of the possible approaches will be sketched.
 

Prof. Luca Dieci (GT Math)

Title: Periodic orbits of planar discontinuous systems under discretization

Abstract:  We consider a piecewise smooth planar system having an attracting periodic orbit of transversal type.  For this, we look at the discrete system resulting from a Euler discretization with fixed stepsize.  We show that, in general, the resulting discrete dynamical system does not possess an invariant curve, unlike what happens for smooth problems.  Still, we show that the discrete trajectories are forced to remain inside a band, whose width is proportional to the stepsize.  We further show that by forcing the numerical solution to step exactly on the discontinuity line, then there is a discrete periodic solution near the one of the original problem.  Finally, we consider what happens to the Euler discretization of the regularized system, and give evidence that the discrete solution undergoes a sequence of period doubling bifurcations with respect to the regularization parameter.  Joint work with Timo Eirola and Cinzia Elia.

Prof. Federico Bonetto (GT Math)
Title: Nash Equilibria in Decentralized Economies with Fiat Money

Abstract: We study the dynamics of a simple economy made by agents that can exchange goods and fiat money. The model was initially introduced '97 by Kiyotaki and Wright to discuss the origin of fiat money and its relation with commodity money. Notwithstanding its simplicity, the dynamics it generate is rather challenging. I'll try to explain the issues involved and possible solutions.

Prof. Haomin Zhou (GT Math)
Title: A Brief Introduction to Optimal Transport on Finite Graphs

Abstract: Optimal transport theory in continuous space has been extensively studied in
the past few decades. In this talk, I will present similar matters on discrete
spaces. Various recent developments related to free energy,
Fokker-Planck equations, as well as Wasserstein distance on graphs will be discussed,
some of them are rather surprising. This presentation is based on several joint
papers with Shui-Nee Chow (Georgia Tech), Wen Huang (USTC), Wuchen Li (UCLA),
Yao Li (U. Mass), Haoyan Zhai (Georgia Tech).