Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A trajectory is quasiperiodic if the trajectory lies on and is dense in some d-dimensional torus, and there is a choice of coordinates on the torus for which F has the form F(t) = t + rho (mod 1) for all points in the torus, and for some rho in the torus. There is an extensive literature on determining the coordinates of the vector rho, called the rotation numbers of F. However, even in the one-dimensional case there has been no general method for computing the vector rho given only the trajectory (u_n), though there are plenty of special cases. I will present a computational method called the Embedding Continuation Method for computing some components of r from a trajectory. It is based on the Takens Embedding Theorem and the Birkhoff Ergodic Theorem. There is however a caveat; the coordinates of the rotation vector depend on the choice of coordinates of the torus. I will give a statement of the various sets of possible rotation numbers that rho can yield. I will illustrate these ideas with one- and two-dimensional examples.

Recent advances in fluid dynamics reveal that the recurrent flows observed in moderate Reynolds number turbulence result from close passes to unstable invariant solutions of Navier-Stokes equations. By now hundreds of such solutions been computed for a variety of flow geometries, but always confined to small computational domains (minimal cells).Pipe, channel and plane flows, however, are flows on infinite spatial domains. We propose to recast the Navier-Stokes equations as a space-time theory, with the unstable invariant solutions now being the space-time tori (and not the 1-dimensional periodic orbits of the classical periodic orbit theory). The symbolic dynamics is likewise higher-dimensional (rather than a single temporal string of symbols). In this theory there is no time, there is only a repertoire of admissible spatiotemporal patterns.We illustrate the strategy by solving a very simple classical field theory on a lattice modelling many-particle quantum chaos, adiscretized screened Poisson equation, or the ``spatiotemporal cat.'' No actual cats, graduate or undergraduate, have showninterest in, or were harmed during this research.

In this series of talks, we will study the relationship between the Alexander module and the bordered Floer homology of the Seifert surface complement. In particular, we will show that bordered Floer categorifies Donaldson's TQFT description of the Alexander module. No prior knowledge of the Alexander module or Heegaard Floer homology will be assumed.

In this talk we will discuss the paper of Adiprasito, Huh, and Katz titled "Hodge Theory for Combinatorial Geometries," which establishes the log-concavity of the characteristic polynomial of a matroid.