Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Originally introduced independently by Hassler Whitney and Takeo Nakasawa, matroids are a combinatorial way of axiomatizing the notion of linear independence in vector spaces. If $K$ is a field and $n$ is a positive integer, any linear subspace of $K^n$ gives rise to a matroid; such matroid are called representable over $K$. Given a matroid $M$, one can ask over which fields $M$ is representable. More generally, one can ask about representability over partial fields in the sense of Semple and Whittle. Pendavingh and van Zwam introduced the universal partial field of a matroid $M$, which governs the representations of $M$ over all partial fields. Unfortunately, most matroids (asymptotically 100%, in fact) are not representable over any partial field, and in this case, the universal partial field gives no information.

Oliver Lorscheid and I have introduced a generalization of the universal partial field which we call the foundation of a matroid. The foundation of $M$ is a type of algebraic object which we call a pasture; pastures include both hyperfields and partial fields. Pastures form a natural class of field-like objects within Lorscheid's theory of ordered blueprints, and they have desirable categorical properties (e.g., existence of products and coproducts) that make them a natural context in which to study algebraic invariants of matroids. The foundation of a matroid $M$ represents the functor taking a pasture $F$ to the set of rescaling equivalence classes of $F$-representations of $M$; in particular, $M$ is representable over a pasture $F$ if and only if there is a homomorphism from the foundation of $M$ to $F$. (In layman's terms, what we're trying to do is recast as much as possible of the theory of matroids and their representations in functorial ``Grothendieck-style'' algebraic geometry, with the goal of gaining new conceptual insights into various phenomena which were previously understood only through lengthy case-by-case analyses and ad hoc computations.)

As a particular application of this point of view, I will explain the classification which Lorscheid and I have recently obtained of all possible foundations for ternary matroids (matroids representable over the field of three elements). The proof of this classification theorem relies crucially on Tutte's celebrated Homotopy Theorem. 

Consider a stochastic process (such as a stochastic differential equation) arising from applications. In practice, we are interested in many things like the invariant probability measure, the sensitivity of the invariant probability measure, and the speed of convergence to the invariant probability measure. Existing rigorous estimates of these problems usually cannot provide enough details. In this talk I will introduce a few data-driven computational methods that solve these problems for a class of stochastic dynamical systems, including but not limited to stochastic differential equations. All these methods are driven by the simulation data, and are less affected by the curse-of-dimensionality than traditional grid-based methods. I will demonstrate a few high (up to 100) dimensional examples in my talk.

While the existence and properties of the SRB measure for the billiard map associated with a periodic Lorentz gas are well understood, there are few results regarding other types of measures for dispersing billiards. We begin by proposing a naive definition of topological entropy for the billiard map, and show that it is equivalent to several classical definitions. We then prove a variational principle for the topological entropy and proceed to construct a unique probability measure which achieves the maximum. This measure is Bernoulli and positive on open sets. An essential ingredient is a proof of the absolute continuity of the unstable foliation with respect to the measure of maximal entropy. This is joint work with Viviane Baladi.
 

Tutte proved that every 4-connected planar graph contains a Hamilton cycle, but
there are 3-connected $n$-vertex graphs whose longest cycles have length
$\Theta(n^{\log_32})$. On the other hand,  Jackson and Wormald proved that an
essentially 4-connected $n$-vertex planar graph contains a cycle of
length at least $(2n+4)/5$, which was improved to $5(n+2)/8$ by Fabrici {\it et al}.  We improve this bound to $\lceil (2n+6)/3\rceil$ for $n\ge 6$ by proving a quantitative version of a result of Thomassen,
 and the bound is best possible.