Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Trisections of 4-manifolds relative to their boundary were introduced by Gay and Kirby in 2012. They are decompositions of 4-manifolds that induce open book decomposition in the bounding 3-manifolds. This talk will focus on diagrams of relative trisections and will be divided in two. In the first half I will focus on trisections as fillings of open book decompositions and I will present different fillings of different open book decompositions of the Poincare homology sphere. In the second half I will show examples of trisections of pieces of some of the surgery techniques that result in exotic 4-manifolds.

In this introductory talk we present some basic results in ergodic theory, due to Poincare, von Neumann, and Birkhoff. We will also discuss many examples of dynamical systems where the theory can be applied. As motivation for a broad audience, we will go over the connection of the theory with someclassical problems in statistical mechanics.

An adaptive hybrid level set moment-of-fluid method is developed to study the material solidification of static and dynamic multiphase systems. The main focus is on the solidification of water droplets, which may undergo normal or supercooled freezing. We model the different regimes of freezing such as supercooling, nucleation, recalescence, isothermal freezing and solid cooling accordingly to capture physical dynamics during impact and solidification of water droplets onto solid surfaces. The numerical simulations are validated by comparison to analytical results and experimental observations. The present simulations demonstrate the ability of the method to capture sharp solidification front, handle contact line dynamics, and the simultaneous impact, merging and freezing of a drop. Parameter studies have been conducted, which show the influence of the Stefan number on the regularity of the shape of frozen droplets. Also, it is shown that impacting droplets with different sizes create ice shapes which are uniform near the impact point and become dissimilar away from it. In addition, surface wettability determines whether droplets freeze upon impact or bounce away.

If Google Scholar gives you everything you want, what could Georgia Tech Library possibly do for you? Come learn how to better leverage the tools you know and discover some resources you may not. Get to know your tireless Math Librarian and figure out how to navigate the changes coming with Library Next. This is also an opportunity to have a voice in the Library’s future, so bring ideas for discussion. Refreshments will be served.

We will show that every closed orientable 3-manifold bounds an orientable 4-manifold. If time permits, we will also see an application to embedding closed orientable 3-manifolds to R^5.

The thin-shell or variance conjecture asks whether the variance of the Euclidean norm, with respect to the uniform measure on an isotropic convex body, can be bounded from above by an absolute constant times the mean of the Euclidean norm (if the answer to this is affirmative, then we have as a consequence that most of the mass of the isotropic convex body is concentrated in an annulus with very small width, a "thin shell''). So far all the general bounds we know depend on the dimension of the bodies, however for a few special families of convex bodies, like the $\ell_p$ balls, the conjecture has been resolved optimally. In this talk, I will talk about another family of convex bodies, the unit balls of the Schatten classes (by this we mean spaces of square matrices with real, complex or quaternion entries equipped with the $\ell_p$-norm of their singular values, as well as their subspaces of self-adjoint matrices).In a joint work with Jordan Radke, we verified the conjecture for the operator norm (case of $p = \infty$) on all three general spaces of square matrices, as well as for complex self-adjoint matrices, and we also came up with a necessary condition for the conjecture to be true for any of the other p-Schatten norms on these spaces. I will discuss how one can obtain these results: an essential step in the proofs is reducing the question to corresponding variance estimates with respect to the joint probability density of the singular values of the matrices.Time permitting, I will also talk about a different method to obtain such variance estimates that allows to verify the variance conjecture for the operator norm on the remaining spaces as well.

A tournament is a directed graph obtained by orienting each edge of a complete graph. A set of vertices D is a dominating set in a tournament if every vertex not in D is pointed by a vertex in D. A tournament H is a rebel if there exists k such that every H-free tournament has a dominating set of size at most k. Wu conjectured that every tournament is a rebel. This conjecture, if true, implies several other conjectures about tournaments. However, we will prove that Wu's conjecture is false in general and prove a necessary condition for being rebels. In addition, we will prove that every 2-colorable tournament and at least one non-2-colorable tournament are rebels. The later implies an open case of a conjecture of Berger, Choromanski, Chudnovsky, Fox, Loebl, Scott, Seymour and Thomasse about coloring tournaments. This work is joint with Maria Chudnovsky, Ringi Kim, Paul Seymour and Stephan Thomasse.

Exact oracle inequalities for regression have been extensively studied in statistics and learning theory over the past decade. In the case of a misspecified model, the focus has been on either parametric or convex classes. We present a new estimator that steps outside of the model in the non-convex case and reduces to least squares in the convex case. To analyze the estimator for general non-parametric classes, we prove a generalized Pythagorean theorem and study the supremum of a negative-mean stochastic process (which we term the offset Rademacher complexity) via the chaining technique.(joint work with T. Liang and K. Sridharan)

We study the cost function for hierarchical clusterings introduced by Dasgupta where hierarchies are treated as first-class objects rather than deriving their cost from projections into flat clusters. It was also shown that a top-down algorithm returns a hierarchical clustering of cost at most O (α_n log n) times the cost of the optimal hierarchical clustering, where α_n is the approximation ratio of the Sparsest Cut subroutine used. Thus using the best known approximation algorithm for Sparsest Cut due to Arora-Rao-Vazirani, the top down algorithm returns a hierarchical clustering of cost at most O(log^{3/2} n) times the cost of the optimal solution. We improve this by giving an O(log n)- approximation algorithm for this problem. Our main technical ingredients are a combinatorial characterization of ultrametrics induced by this cost function, deriving an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for this family of ultrametrics, and showing how to iteratively round an LP relaxation of this formulation by using the idea of sphere growing which has been extensively used in the context of graph partitioning. We also prove that our algorithm returns an O(log n)-approximate hierarchical clustering for a generalization of this cost function also studied in Dasgupta. This joint work with Sebastian Pokutta is to appear in NIPS 2016 (oral presentation).

I will give 2 or 3 lectures on Legendrian contact homology. This invariant has played a big role in our understanding of Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds in all dimensions. We will discuss the general definition but focus on the 3-dimensional setting where it easiest to compute (and describe Legendrian knots). I will also discuss the A^\infty structure associated to the linearized co-chain groups of contact homology.

In this talk we will discuss an answer to a question of Alexander Koldobsky and present a discrete version of his slicing inequality. We let $\# K$ be a number of integer lattice points contained in a set $K$. We show that for each $d\in \mathbb{N}$ there exists a constant $C(d)$ depending on $d$ only, such that for any origin-symmetric convex body $K \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ containing $d$ linearly independent lattice points $$ \# K \leq C(d)\text{max}_{\xi \in S^{d-1}}(\# (K\cap \xi^\perp))\, \text{vol}_d(K)^{\frac{1}{d}},$$where $\xi^\perp$ is the hyperplane orthogonal to a unit vector $\xi$ .We show that $C(d)$ can be chosen asymptotically of order $O(1)^d$ for hyperplane slices. Additionally, we will discuss some special cases and generalizations for this inequality. This is a joint work with Martin Henk and Artem Zvavitch.

In the first part of the talks 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 (continuation of last talk).