Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Almost all biological activities involve transport and distribution of ions and charged particles. The complicated coupling and competition between different ionic solutions in various biological environments give the intricate specificity and selectivity in these systems. In this talk, I will introduce several extended general diffusion systems motivated by the study of ion channels and ionic solutions in biological cells. In particular, I will focus on the interactions between different species, the boundary effects and in many cases, the thermal effects.

Existence of ballistic transport for Schr ̈odinger operator with a quasi- periodic potential in dimension two is discussed. Considerations are based on the following properties of the operator: the spectrum of the operator contains a semiaxis of absolutely continuous spectrum and there are generalized eigenfunctions being close to plane waves ei⟨⃗k,⃗x⟩ (as |⃗k| → ∞) at every point of this semiaxis. The isoenergetic curves in the space of momenta ⃗k corresponding to these eigenfunctions have a form of slightly distorted circles with holes (Cantor type structure).

Peter Lambert-Cole: Mutant knots are notoriously hard to distinguish. Many, but not all, knot invariants take the same value on mutant pairs. Khovanov homology with coefficients in Z/2Z is known to be mutation-invariant, while the bigraded knot Floer homology groups can distinguish mutants such as the famous Kinoshita-Terasaka and Conway pair. However, Baldwin and Levine conjectured that delta-graded knot Floer homology, a singly-graded reduction of the full invariant, is preserved by mutation. In this talk, I will give a new proof that Khovanov homology mod 2 is mutation-invariant. The same strategy can be applied to delta-graded knot Floer homology and proves the Baldwin-Levine conjecture for mutations on a large class of tangles. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Alex Zupan: Generally speaking, given a type of manifold decomposition, a natural problem is to determine the structure of all decompositions for a fixed manifold. In particular, it is interesting to understand the space of decompositions for the simplest objects. For example, Waldhausen's Theorem asserts that up to isotopy, the 3-sphere has a unique Heegaard splitting in every genus, and Otal proved an analogous result for classical bridge splittings of the unknot. In both cases, we say that these decompositions are "standard," since they can be viewed as generic modifications of a minimal splitting. In this talk, we examine a similar question in dimension four, proving that -- unlike the situation in dimension three -- the unknotted 2-sphere in the 4-sphere admits a non-standard bridge trisection. This is joint work with Jeffrey Meier.

We present a mean field model of electroencephalographic activity in the brain, which is composed of a system of coupled ODEs and PDEs. We show the existence and uniqueness of weak and strong solutions of this model and investigate the regularity of the solutions. We establish biophysically plausible semidynamical system frameworks and show that the semigroups of weak and strong solution operators possess bounded absorbing sets. We show that there exist parameter values for which the semidynamical systems do not possess a global attractor due to the lack of the compactness property. In this case, the internal dynamics of the ODE components of the solutions can create asymptotic spatial discontinuities in the solutions, regardless of the smoothness of the initial values and forcing terms.