Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Braid groups

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, February 27, 2019 - 12:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Dan Margalit – Georgia Tech
An element of the braid group can be visualized as a collection of n strings that are braided (like a hair braid). Braid groups are ubiquitous in mathematics in science, as they record the motions of a number of points in the plane. These points can be autonomous vehicles, particles in a 2-dimensional medium, or roots of a polynomial. We will give an introduction to and a survey of braid groups, and discuss what is known about homomorphisms between braid groups.

Inference of evolutionary dynamics of heterogeneous cancer and viral populations

Series
Mathematical Biology Seminar
Time
Wednesday, February 27, 2019 - 11:01 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Pavel Skums – GSU/CDC –

Inference of evolutionary dynamics of heterogeneous cancer and viral populations Abstract: Genetic diversity of cancer cell populations and intra-host viral populations is one of the major factors influencing disease progression and treatment outcome. However, evolutionary dynamics of such populations remain poorly understood. Quantification of selection is a key step to understanding evolutionary mechanisms driving cancer and viral diseases. We will introduce a mathematical model and an algorithmic framework for inference of fitness landscapes of heterogeneous populations from genomic data. It is based on a maximal likelihood approach, whose objective is to estimate a vector of clone/strain fitnesses which better fits the observed tumor phylogeny, observed population structure and the dynamical system describing evolution of the population as a branching process. We will discuss our approach to solve the problem by transforming the original continuous maximum likelihood problem into a discrete optimization problem, which could be considered as a variant of scheduling problem with precedent constraints and with non-linear cumulative cost function.

Wiener-Hopf Factorization for Markov Processes

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 168
Speaker
R. Gong – Illinois Institute of Technology

Wiener-Hopf factorization (WHf) encompasses several important results in probability and stochastic processes, as well as in operator theory. The importance of the WHf stems not only from its theoretical appeal, manifested, in part, through probabilistic interpretation of analytical results, but also from its practical applications in a wide range of fields, such as fluctuation theory, insurance and finance. The various existing forms of the WHf for Markov chains, strong Markov processes, Levy processes, and Markov additive process, have been obtained only in the time-homogeneous case. However, there are abundant real life dynamical systems that are modeled in terms of time-inhomogenous processes, and yet the corresponding Wiener-Hopf factorization theory is not available for this important class of models. In this talk, I will first provide a survey on the development of Wiener-Hopf factorization for time-homogeneous Markov chains, Levy processes, and Markov additive processes. Then, I will discuss our recent work on WHf for time-inhomogensous Markov chains. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to investigate the WHf for time-inhomogeneous Markov processes.

Boundary regularity for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Professor Hongjie Dong – Brown University –
I will first give a short introduction of the Navier-Stokes equations, then review some previous results on theconditional regularity of solutions to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in the critical Lebesguespaces, and finally discuss some recent work which mainly addressed the boundary regularity issue.

Joint GT-UGA Seminar at GT - Knots in homology spheres, concordance, and crossing changes

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, February 25, 2019 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Chris Davis – U Wisconsin Eau Claire
Any knot in $S^3$ may be reduced to a slice knot by making some crossing changes. Indeed, this slice knot can be taken to be the unknot. We show that the same is true of knots in homology spheres, at least topologically. Something more complicated is true smoothly, as not every homology sphere bounds a smooth simply connected homology ball. We prove that a knot in a homology sphere is null-homotopic in a homology ball if and only if that knot can be reduced to the unknot by a sequence of concordances and crossing changes. We will show that there exist knot in a homology sphere which cannot be reduced to the unknot by any such sequence. As a consequence, there are knots in homology spheres which are not concordant to those examples produced by Levine in 2016 and Hom-Lidman-Levine in 2018.

ACO Director Interview Seminar by Prasad Tetali

Series
Other Talks
Time
Monday, February 25, 2019 - 14:15 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Prasad Tetali – Georgia Tech
Georgia Tech is leading the way in Creating the Next in higher education.In this talk I will present (1) My vision for ACO and (2) how my research relates naturally to ACO both where the A,C,O fields are going, and my own specific interests

Joint GT-UGA Seminar at GT - Knot Traces and the Slice Genus

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, February 25, 2019 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Lisa Piccirillo – UT Austin
Smooth simply connected 4-manifolds can admit second homology classes not representable by smoothly embedded spheres; knot traces are the prototypical example of 4-manifolds with such classes. I will show that there are knot traces where the minimal genus smooth surface generating second homology is not of the canonical type, resolving question 1.41 on the Kirby problem list. I will also use the same tools to show that Conway knot does not bound a smooth disk in the four ball, which completes the classification of slice knots under 13 crossings and gives the first example of a non-slice knot which is both topologically slice and a positive mutant of a slice knot.

Random perturbations of dynamical systems

Series
CDSNS Colloquium
Time
Monday, February 25, 2019 - 11:15 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Yun Yang – City Univ. NY
The real world is inherently noisy, and so it is natural to consider the random perturbations of deterministic dynamical systems and seek to understand the corresponding asymptotic behavior, i.e., the phenomena that can be observed under long-term iteration. In this talk, we will study the random perturbations of a family of circle maps $f_a$. We will obtain, a checkable, finite-time criterion on the parameter a for random perturbation of $f_a$ to exhibit a unique, and thus ergodic, stationary measure.

Field electron emission and the Fowler-Nordheim equation

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, February 22, 2019 - 16:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Ian Jauslin – Princeton University –
Consider a metallic field emitter shaped like a thin needle, at the tip of which a large electric field is applied. Electrons spring out of the metal under the influence of the field. The celebrated and widely used Fowler-Nordheim equation predicts a value for the current outside the metal. In this talk, I will show that the Fowler-Nordheim equation emerges as the long-time asymptotic solution of a Schrodinger equation with a realistic initial condition, thereby justifying the use of the Fowler Nordheim equation in real setups. I will also discuss the rate of convergence to the Fowler-Nordheim regime.

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