## Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Monday, March 11, 2019 - 12:50 , Location: Skiles 005 , Borys Kadets , MIT , , Organizer: Yoav Len

Let X be a degree d curve in the projective space P^r.

A general hyperplane H intersects X at d distinct points; varying H defines a monodromy action on X∩H. The resulting permutation group G is the sectional monodromy group of X. When the ground field has characteristic zero the group G is known to be the full symmetric group.

By work of Harris, if G contains the alternating group, then X satisfies a strengthened Castelnuovo's inequality (relating the degree and the genus of X).

The talk is concerned with sectional monodromy groups in positive characteristic. I will describe all non-strange non-degenerate curves in projective spaces of dimension r>2 for which G is not symmetric or alternating. For a particular family of plane curves, I will compute the sectional monodromy groups and thus answer an old question on Galois groups of generic trinomials.

Monday, March 11, 2019 - 12:45 , Location: Skiles 257 , Hannah Schwartz , Bryn Mawr , Organizer: John Etnyre

In this talk, we will examine the relationship between homotopy, topological isotopy, and smooth isotopy of surfaces in 4-manifolds. In particular, we will discuss how to produce (1) examples of topologically but not smoothly isotopic spheres, and (2) a smooth isotopy from a homotopy, under special circumstances (i.e. Gabai's recent work on the 4D Lightbulb Theorem").

Series: Other Talks
Saturday, March 9, 2019 - 13:00 , Location: Ebster Recreation Center, Decatur , Evans Harrell, Matt Baker, and GT Club Math, among others , Georgia Tech, Emory, and others , , Organizer: Evans M. Harrell

Mathapalooza! is simultaneously a Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival and an event of the Atlanta Science Festival. There will be puzzles and games, a magic show by Matt Baker, mathematically themed courtroom skits by GT Club Math, a presentation about math and dance by Manuela Manetta, a presentation about math and music by David Borthwick, and a gallery of mathematical art curated by Elisabetta Matsumoto. It is free, and we anticipate engaging hundreds of members of the public in the wonders of mathematics. More info at https://mathematics-in-motion.org/about/Be there or B^2 !

Friday, March 8, 2019 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Prof. Yongxin Chen , GT AE , Organizer: Sung Ha Kang

Two recent extensions of optimal mass transport theory will be covered. In the first part of the talk, we will discuss measure-valued spline, which generalizes the notion of cubic spline to the space of distributions. It addresses the problem to smoothly interpolate (empirical) probability measures. Potential applications include time sequence interpolation or regression of images, histograms or aggregated datas. In the second part of the talk, we will introduce matrix-valued optimal transport. It extends the optimal transport theory to handle matrix-valued densities. Several instances are quantum states, color images, diffusion tensor images and multi-variate power spectra. The new tool is expected to have applications in these domains. We will focus on theoretical side of the stories in both parts of the talk.

Thursday, March 7, 2019 - 15:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , Samy Tindel , Purdue University , Organizer: Christian Houdre

In this talk I will first recall some general facts about the parabolic Anderson model (PAM), which can be briefly described as a simple heat equation in a random environment. The key phenomenon which has to be observed in this context is called localization. I will review some ways to express this phenomenon, and then single out the so called eigenvectors localization for the Anderson operator. This particular instance of localization motivates our study of large time asymptotics for the stochastic heat equation. In the second part of the talk I will describe the Gaussian environment we consider, which is rougher than white noise, then I will give an account on the asymptotic exponents we obtain as time goes to infinity. If time allows it, I will also give some elements of proof.

Wednesday, March 6, 2019 - 16:30 , Location: Skiles 006 , Youngho Yoo , Georgia Tech , Organizer: Xingxing Yu

Let $\nu$ denote the maximum size of a packing of edge-disjoint triangles in a graph $G$. We can clearly make $G$ triangle-free by deleting $3\nu$ edges. Tuza conjectured in 1981 that $2\nu$ edges suffice, and proved it for planar graphs. The best known general bound is $(3-\frac{3}{23})\nu$ proven by Haxell in 1997. We will discuss this proof and some related results.

Wednesday, March 6, 2019 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , , New York University , , Organizer: Wenjing Liao

Neural networks with a large number of parameters admit a mean-field description, which has recently served as a theoretical explanation for the favorable training properties of "overparameterized" models. In this regime, gradient descent obeys a deterministic partial differential equation (PDE) that converges to a globally optimal solution for networks with a single hidden layer under appropriate assumptions. In this talk, we propose a non-local mass transport dynamics that leads to a modified PDE with the same minimizer. We implement this non-local dynamics as a stochastic neuronal birth-death process and we prove that it accelerates the rate of convergence in the mean-field limit. We subsequently realize this PDE with two classes of numerical schemes that converge to the mean-field equation, each of which can easily be implemented for neural networks with finite numbers of parameters. We illustrate our algorithms with two models to provide intuition for the mechanism through which convergence is accelerated. Joint work with G. Rotskoff (NYU), S. Jelassi (Princeton) and E. Vanden-Eijnden (NYU).

Wednesday, March 6, 2019 - 13:55 , Location: Skiles 005 , Hong Wang , MIT , Organizer: Shahaf Nitzan

If $f$ is a function supported on a truncated paraboloid, what can we say about $Ef$, the Fourier transform of f? Stein conjectured in the 1960s that for any $p>3$, $\|Ef\|_{L^p(R^3)} \lesssim \|f\|_{L^{\infty}}$.

We make a small progress toward this conjecture and show that it holds for $p> 3+3/13\approx 3.23$. In the proof, we combine polynomial partitioning techniques introduced by Guth and the two ends argument introduced by Wolff and Tao.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019 - 15:05 , Location: Skiles 168 , Martin Wahl , Humboldt University, Berlin. , Organizer: Christian Houdre

We identify principal component analysis (PCA) as an empirical risk minimization problem with respect to the reconstruction error and prove non-asymptotic upper bounds for the corresponding excess risk. These bounds unify and improve existing upper bounds from the literature. In particular, they give oracle inequalities under mild eigenvalue conditions. We also discuss how our results can be transferred to the subspace distance and, for instance, how our approach leads to a sharp $\sin \Theta$ theorem for empirical covariance operators. The proof is based on a novel contraction property, contrasting previous spectral perturbation approaches. This talk is based on joint works with Markus Reiß and Moritz Jirak.

Series: PDE Seminar
Tuesday, March 5, 2019 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Professor Shouhong Wang , Indiana University , , Organizer: Xukai Yan

First, we introduce a new field theoretical interpretation of quantum mechanical wave functions, by postulating that the wave function is the common wave function for all particles in the same class determined by the external potential V, of the modulus of the wave function represents the distribution density of the particles, and the gradient of phase of the wave function provides the velocity field of the particles. Second, we show that the key for condensation of bosonic particles is that their interaction is sufficiently weak to ensure that a large collection of boson particles are in a state governed by the same condensation wave function field under the same bounding potential V. For superconductivity, the formation of superconductivity comes down to conditions for the formation of electron-pairs, and for the electron-pairs to share a common wave function. Thanks to the recently developed PID interaction potential of electrons and the average-energy level formula of temperature, these conditions for superconductivity are explicitly derived. Furthermore, we obtain both microscopic and macroscopic formulas for the critical temperature. Third, we derive the field and topological phase transition equations for condensates, and make connections to the quantum phase transition, as a topological phase transition. This is joint work with Tian Ma.