Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We consider the Benjamin Ono equation, modeling one-dimensional long interval waves in a stratified fluid, with a slowly-varying potential perturbation. Starting with near soliton initial data, we prove that the solution remains close to a soliton wave form, with parameters of position and scale evolving according to effective ODEs depending on the potential. The result is valid on a time-scale that is dynamically relevant, and highlights the effect of the perturbation. It is proved using a Lyapunov functional built from energy and mass, Taylor expansions, spectral estimates, and estimates for the Hilbert transform.

Prime-power-fold cyclic branched covers along smoothly slice knots all bound rational homology balls. This phenomenon, however, does not characterize slice knots: In this talk, we give examples of non-slice knots that have the above property. This is joint work with Aceto, Meier, A. Miller, M. Miller, and Stipsicz.

The cosmetic surgery conjecture states that no two different Dehn surgeries on a given knot produce the same oriented 3-manifold (such a pair of surgeries is called purely cosmetic). For knots in S^3, I will describe how knot Floer homology provides a strong obstruction to the existence of purely cosmetic surgeries. For many knots, including all alternating knots with genus not equal to two as well as all but 337 of the first 1.7 million knots, this is enough to confirm the conjecture. For the remaining knots, all but finitely many surgery slopes are obstructed, so checking the conjecture for a given knot reduces to distinguishing finitely many pairs of manifolds. Using a computer search, the conjecture has been verified for all prime knots with up to 16 crossings, as well as for arbitrary connected sums of such knots. These results significantly improve on earlier work of Ni and Wu, who also used Heegaard Floer homology to obstruct purely cosmetic surgeries. The improvement comes from using the full graded Heegaard Floer invariant, which is facilitated by a recent recasting of knot Floer homology as a collection of immersed curves in the punctured torus.

We shall discuss the recent breakthrough of  Annika Heckel on the chromatic number of the binomial random graph G(n,1/2),  showing that it is not concentrated on any sequence of intervals of length n^{1/4-o(1)}.

To put this into context, in 1992 Erdos (and also Bollobás in 2004) asked for any non-trivial results asserting a lack of concentration, pointing out that even the weakest such results would be of interest.  
Until recently this seemed completely out of reach, in part because there seemed to be no obvious approach/strategy how to get one's foot in the door. 
Annika Heckel has now found such an approach, based on a clever coupling idea that compares the chromatic number of G(n,1/2) for different n. 
In this informal talk we shall try to say a few words about her insightful proof approach from https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.11808

Please note the unusual room (Skiles 202)