Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Making math figures with Inkscape

Series
AMS Club Seminar
Time
Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - 12:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Marcel CelayaGeorgia Tech
Inkscape is an powerful open-source drawing program suitable for making figures for your math papers and lectures. In this talk I will discuss some of the useful tricks and features that you can take advantage of in this software, as well as some things to avoid. This will be a live demonstration talk, please bring a laptop if you can.

Combinatorial models for surface and free group symmetries.

Series
Dissertation Defense
Time
Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - 10:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Shane ScottGeorgia Tech
The curve complex of Harvey allows combinatorial representation of a surface mappingclass group by describing its action on simple closed curves. Similar complexes of spheres,free factors, and free splittings allow combinatorial representation of the automorphisms ofa free group. We consider a Birman exact sequence for combinatorial models of mappingclass groups and free group automorphisms. We apply this and other extension techniquesto compute the automorphism groups of several simplicial complexes associated with map-ping class groups and automorphisms of free groups.

Asymptotics in random balls models

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, June 12, 2018 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Jean-Christophe BretonUniversity of Rennes
Random balls models are collections of Euclidean balls whose centers and radii are generated by a Poisson point process. Such collections model various contexts ranging from imaging to communication network. When the distributions driving the centers and the radii are heavy-tailed, interesting interference phenomena occurs when the model is properly zoomed-out. The talk aims to illustrate such phenomena and to give an overview of the asymptotic behavior of functionals of interest. The limits obtained include in particular stable fields, (fractional) Gaussian fields and Poissonian bridges. Related questions will also be discussed.

Mating habits of polynomials

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Sarah KochU Michigan
Given two complex polynomials, we can try to mathematically paste them together to obtain a rational function through a procedure known as mating the polynomials. In this talk, we will begin by trying to understand the "shape" of complex polynomials in general. We will then discuss the mating of two quadratic polynomials: we explore examples where the mating does exist, and examples where it does not. There will be lots of movies and exploration in this talk.

A dynamic system problem in religious group growth and survival

Series
Dynamical Systems Working Seminar
Time
Wednesday, May 30, 2018 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Tongzhou ChenGT Math
We model and analyze the dynamics of religious group membership and size. A groups is distinguished by its strictness, which determines how much time group members are expected to spend contributing to the group. Individuals differ in their rate of return for time spent outside of their religious group. We construct a utility function that individ- uals attempt to maximize, then find a Nash Equilibrium for religious group participation with a heterogeneous population. We then model dynamics of group size by including birth, death, and switching of individuals between groups. Group switching depends on the strictness preferences of individuals and their probability of encountering members of other groups.

Fillability of positive contact surgeries and Lagrangian disks

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - 14:00 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Bulent TosunUniversity of Alabama

Please Note: This will be a 90 minute seminar

It is well known that all contact 3-manifolds can be obtained from the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere by contact surgery on a Legendrian link. Hence, an interesting and much studied question asks what properties are preserved under various types of contact surgeries. The case for the negative contact surgeries is fairly well understood. In this talk, we will discuss some new results about positive contact surgeries and in particular completely characterize when contact r surgery is symplectically/Stein fillable when r is in (0,1]. This is joint work with James Conway and John Etnyre.

Scattering below the ground state for nonlinear Schrödinger equations

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Jason MurphyMissouri University of Science and Technology
The ground state solution to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) is a global, non-scattering solution that often provides a threshold between scattering and blowup. In this talk, we will discuss new, simplified proofs of scattering below the ground state threshold (joint with B. Dodson) in both the radial and non-radial settings.

Oral Exam: Contact structures on hyperbolic 3-manifolds

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Hyunki MinGeorgia Tech
Understanding contact structures on hyperbolic 3-manifolds is one of the major open problems in the area of contact topology. As a first step, we try to classify tight contact structures on a specific hyperbolic 3-manifold. In this talk, we will review the previous classification results and classify tight contact structures on the Weeks manifold, which has the smallest hyperbolic volume. Finally, we will discuss how to generalize this method to classify tight contact structures on some other hyperbolic 3-manifolds.

Local Space and Time Scaling Exponents for Diffusion on a Compact Metric Space (Thesis Defense)

Series
Dissertation Defense
Time
Monday, April 30, 2018 - 15:05 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John DeverGeorgia Tech
We provide a new definition of a local walk dimension beta that depends only on the metric. Moreover, we study the local Hausdorff dimension and prove that any variable Ahlfors regular measure of variable dimension Q is strongly equivalent to the local Hausdorff measure with Q the local Hausdorff dimension, generalizing the constant dimensional case. Additionally, we provide constructions of several variable dimensional spaces, including a new example of a variable dimensional Sierpinski carpet. We use the local exponent beta in time-scale renormalization of discrete time random walks, that are approximate at a given scale in the sense that the expected jump size is the order of the space scale. We consider the condition that the expected time to leave a ball scales like the radius of the ball to the power beta of the center. We then study the Gamma and Mosco convergence of the resulting continuous time approximate walks as the space scale goes to zero. We prove that a non-trivial Dirichlet form with Dirichlet boundary conditions on a ball exists as a Mosco limit of approximate forms. We also prove tightness of the associated continuous time processes.

The h-principle and totally convex immersions

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, April 30, 2018 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Michael HarrisonLehigh University
The h-principle is a powerful tool in differential topology which is used to study spaces of functionswith certain distinguished properties (immersions, submersions, k-mersions, embeddings, free maps, etc.). Iwill discuss some examples of the h-principle and give a neat proof of a special case of the Smale-HirschTheorem, using the "removal of singularities" h-principle technique due to Eliashberg and Gromov. Finally, I willdefine and discuss totally convex immersions and discuss some h-principle statements in this context.

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