Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Fiber sums and the rational blowdown have been very useful tools in constructing smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifolds. Applying these tools to genus g>1 Lefschetz fibrations with clustered nodal fibers, we will construct symplectic Lefschetz fibrations realizing all the lattice points in the symplectic geography plane below the Noether line, providing a symplectic extension of classical works populating the complex geography plane with holomorphic Lefschetz fibrations. Moreover, Lefschetz fibrations with certain clustered nodal fibers provide rational blowdown configurations that yield new constructions of small symplectic exotic 4-manifolds. We will present an example of a construction of a minimal symplectic exotic CP^2#-5CP^2 through this procedure applied to a genus-3 fibration. This work is joint with Inanc Baykur and Mustafa Korkmaz.

In modern data analysis, the datasets are often represented by large-scale matrices or tensors (the generalization of matrices to higher dimensions). To have a better understanding or extract   values effectively from these data, an important step is to construct a low-dimensional/compressed representation of the data that may be better to analyze and interpret in light of a corpus of field-specific information. To implement the goal, a primary tool is the matrix/tensor decomposition. In this talk, I will talk about novel matrix/tensor decompositions, CUR decompositions, which are memory efficient and computationally cheap. Besides, I will also discuss the applications of CUR decompositions on developing efficient algorithms or models to robust decompositions or data completion problems. Additionally, some simulation results will be provided on real and synthetic datasets. 

Graph burning is a simplified model for the spread of influence in a network. Associated with the process is the burning number, which quantifies the speed at which the influence spreads to every vertex. The Burning Number Conjecture claims that for every connected graph $G$ of order $n,$ its burning number satisfies $b(G) \le \lceil \sqrt{n} \rceil$. While the conjecture remains open, we prove the best-known bound on the burning number of a connected graph $G$ of order $n,$ given by $b(G) \le \sqrt{4n/3} + 1$, improving on the previously known $\sqrt{3n/2}+O(1)$ bound.

We describe a spatial Moran model that captures mechanical interactions and directional growth in spatially extended populations. The model is analytically tractable and completely solvable under a mean-field approximation and can elucidate the mechanisms that drive the formation of population-level patterns. As an example, we model a population of E. coli growing in a rectangular microfluidic trap. We show that spatial patterns can arise because of a tug-of-war between boundary effects and growth rate modulations due to cell-cell interactions: Cells align parallel to the long side of the trap when boundary effects dominate. However, when cell-cell interactions exceed a critical value, cells align orthogonally to the trap’s long side. This modeling approach and analysis can be extended to directionally growing cells in a variety of domains to provide insight into how local and global interactions shape collective behavior. As an example, we discuss how our model reveals how changes to a cell-shape describing parameter may manifest at the population level of the microbial collective. Specifically, we discuss mechanisms revealed by our model on how we may be able to control spatiotemporal patterning by modifying cell shape of a given strain in a multi-strain microbial consortium.

Recording Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/0g6lBzbf0XT

We will discuss Akbulut's construction of two smooth, contractible four-manifolds whose boundaries are diffeomorphic and extend to a homeomorphism but not to a diffeomorphism of the manifolds. 

We will review how divisors on abstract algebraic curves are connected with projective embeddings and then see how that language translates to tropical curves and tropicalization. This talk aims to explain some of the connections between tropical curves and algebraic curves that was not discussed during the seminar on tropical Brill-Noether theory.

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Suppose that $M$ is a closed isotropic Riemannian manifold and that $R_1,...,R_m$ generate the isometry group of $M$. Let $f_1,...,f_m$ be smooth perturbations of these isometries. We show that the $f_i$ are simultaneously conjugate to isometries if and only if their associated uniform Bernoulli random walk has all Lyapunov exponents zero. This extends a linearization result of Dolgopyat and Krikorian from $S^n$ to real, complex, and quaternionic projective spaces.