Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will review various ways of modeling the homotopy theory of spaces: several model categories of simplicial sheaves and simplicial presheaves, and related infinity categorical constructions.

(1) A set D of natural numbers is called t-intersective if every positive upper density subset A of natural numbers contains a (t+1)-length arithmetic progression (AP) whose common differences is in D. Szemeredi's theorem states that the set of all natural numbers is t-intersective for every t. But there are other non-trivial examples like {p-1: p prime}, {1^k,2^k,3^k,\dots} for any k etc. which are t-intersective for every t. A natural question to study is at what density random subsets of natural numbers become t-intersective? (2) Let X_t be the number of t-APs in a random subset of Z/NZ where each element is selected with probability p independently. Can we prove precise estimates on the probability that X_t is much larger than its expectation? (3) Locally decodable codes (LDCs) are error correcting codes which allow ultra fast decoding of any message bit from a corrupted encoding of the message. What is the smallest encoding length of such codes? These seemingly unrelated problems can be addressed by studying the Gaussian width of images of low degree polynomial mappings, which seems to be a fundamental tool applicable to many such problems. Adapting ideas from existing LDC lower bounds, we can prove a general bound on Gaussian width of such sets which reproves the known LDC lower bounds and also implies new bounds for the above mentioned problems. Our bounds are still far from conjectured bounds which suggests that there is plenty of room for improvement. If time permits, we will discuss connections to type constants of injective tensor products of Banach spaces (or chernoff bounds for tensors in simpler terms). Joint work with Jop Briet.

In 1986, Herb Clemens conjectured that on a general quintic threefold, there are finitely many rational curves of any given degree. In this talk, we will give a survey of what is known about this conjecture. We will also highlight the connections between enumerative geometry and physics that arise in studying the quintic threefold.

I will talk about what happens on the spectral transition lines for the almost Mathieu operator. This talk is based on joint works with Svetlana Jitomirskaya and Qi Zhou. For both transition lines \{\beta(\alpha)=\ln{\lambda}\} and \{\gamma(\alpha,\theta)=\ln{\lambda}\} in the positive Lyapunov exponent regime, we show purely point spectrum/purely singular continuous spectrum for dense subsets of frequencies/phases.