Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The Virtual Element Method (VEM), is a very recent technology introduced in [Beirao da Veiga, Brezzi, Cangiani, Manzini, Marini, Russo, 2013, M3AS] for the discretization of partial differential equations, that has shared a good success in recent years. The VEM can be interpreted as a generalization of the Finite Element Method that allows to use general polygonal and polyhedral meshes, still keeping the same coding complexity and allowing for arbitrary degree of accuracy. The Virtual Element Method makes use of local functions that are not necessarily polynomials and are defined in an implicit way. Nevertheless, by a wise choice of the degrees of freedom and introducing a novel construction of the associated stiffness matrixes, the VEM avoids the explicit integration of such shape functions. In addition to the possibility to handle general polytopal meshes, the flexibility of the above construction yields other interesting properties with respect to more standard Galerkin methods. For instance, the VEM easily allows to build discrete spaces of arbitrary C^k regularity, or to satisfy exactly the divergence-free constraint for incompressible fluids. The present talk is an introduction to the VEM, aiming at showing the main ideas of the method. We consider for simplicity a simple elliptic model problem (that is pure diffusion with variable coefficients) but set ourselves in the more involved 3D setting. In the first part we introduce the adopted Virtual Element space and the associated degrees of freedom, first by addressing the faces of the polyhedrons (i.e. polygons) and then building the space in the full volumes. We then describe the construction of the discrete bilinear form and the ensuing discretization of the problem. Furthermore, we show a set of theoretical and numerical results. In the very final part, we will give a glance at more involved problems, such as magnetostatics (mixed problem with more complex spaces interacting) and large deformation elasticity (nonlinear problem).

According to Plucker's formula, the total inflection of a linear series (L,V) on a complex algebraic curve C is fixed by numerical data, namely the degree of L and the dimension of V. Equipping C and (L,V) with compatible real structures, it is more interesting to ask about the total real inflection of (L,V). The topology of the real inflectionary locus depends in a nontrivial way on the topology of the real locus of C. We study this dependency when C is hyperelliptic and (L,V) is a complete series. We first use a nonarchimedean degeneration to relate the (real) inflection of complete series to the (real) inflection of incomplete series on elliptic curves; we then analyze the real loci of Wronskians along an elliptic curve, and formulate some conjectural quantitative estimates.

We study the dynamic graph connectivity problem in the massively parallel computation model. We give a data structure for maintaining a dynamic undirected graph that handles batches of updates and connectivity queries in constant rounds, as long as the queries fit on a single machine. This assumption corresponds to the gradual buildup of databases over time from sources such as log files and user interactions. Our techniques combine a distributed data structure for Euler Tour (ET) trees, a structural theorem about rapidly contracting graphs via sampling n^{\epsilon} random neighbors, as well as modifications to sketching based dynamic connectivity data structures. Joint work with David Durfee, Janardhan Kulkarni, Richard Peng and Xiaorui Sun.

Tropical geometry is a blend of algebraic geometry and polyhedral combinatorics that arises when one looks at algebraic varieties over a valued field. I will give a 50 minute introduction to the subject to highlight some of the key themes.