Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

It's important to have a personal academic webpage—one that is up-to-date, informative, and easy to navigate. This workshop will be a hands-on guide to making an academic webpage and hosting it on the School of Math website. Webpage templates will be provided. Please bring a laptop if you have one, as well as a photograph of yourself for your new website. Come and get the help you need to create a great webpage!

In this talk I will discuss some new applications of the polynomial method to some classical problems in combinatorics, in particular the Cap-Set Problem. The Cap-Set Problem is to determine the size of the largest subset A of F_p^n having no three-term arithmetic progressions, which are triples of vectors x,y,z satisfying x+y=2z. I will discuss an analogue of this problem for Z_4^n and the recent progress on it due to myself, Seva Lev and Peter Pach; and will discuss the work of Ellenberg and Gijswijt, and of Tao, on the F_p^n version (the original context of the problem).

Lately there was a growing interest in studying self-similarity and fractal properties of graphs, which is largely inspired by applications in biology, sociology and chemistry. Such studies often employ statistical physics methods that borrow some ideas from graph theory and general topology, but are not intended to approach the problems under consideration in a rigorous mathematical way. To the best of our knowledge, a rigorous combinatorial theory that defines and studies graph-theoretical analogues of topological fractals still has not been developed. In this paper we introduce and study discrete analogues of Lebesgue and Hausdorff dimensions for graphs. It turned out that they are closely related to well-known graph characteristics such as rank dimension and Prague (or Nesetril-Rodl) dimension. It allowed us to formally define fractal graphs and establish fractality of some graph classes. We show, how Hausdorff dimension of graphs is related to their Kolmogorov complexity. We also demonstrate fruitfulness of this interdisciplinary approach by discover a novel property of general compact metric spaces using ideas from hypergraphs theory and by proving an estimation for Prague dimension of almost all graphs using methods from algorithmic information theory.

Graded posets are partially ordered sets equipped with a unique rank function that respects the partial order and such that neighboring elements in the Hasse diagram have ranks that differ by one. We frequently find them throughout combinatorics, including the canonical partial order on Young diagrams and plane partitions, where their respective rank functions are the area and volume under the configuration. We ask when it is possible to efficiently sample elements with a fixed rank in a graded poset. We show that for certain classes of posets, a biased Markov chain that connects elements in the Hasse diagram allows us to approximately generate samples from any fixed rank in expected polynomial time. While varying a bias parameter to increase the likelihood of a sample of a desired size is common in statistical physics, one typically needs properties such as log-concavity in the number of elements of each size to generate desired samples with sufficiently high probability. Here we do not even require unimodality in order to guarantee that the algorithm succeeds in generating samples of the desired rank efficiently. This joint work with Prateek Bhakta, Ben Cousins, and Dana Randall will appear at SODA 2017.

The knot concordance group consists of knots in the three-sphere modulo the equivalence relation of smooth concordance. We will discuss two concordance invariants coming from knot Floer homology: tau and epsilon.

In the first part of the talk(s) we are going to present a way to study numerically the complex domains of invariant Tori for the standar map. The numerical method is based on Padé approximants. For this part we are going to follow the work of C. Falcolini and R. de la LLave.In the second part we are going to present how the numerical method, developed earlier, can be used to study the complex domains of analyticity of invariant KAM Tori for the dissipative standar map. This part is work in progress jointly with R. Calleja.