Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The piecewise linear objects appearing in tropical geometry are shadows, or skeletons, of nonarchimedean analytic spaces, in the sense of Berkovich, and often capture enough essential information about those spaces to resolve interesting questions about classical algebraic varieties. I will give an overview of tropical geometry as it relates to the study of algebraic curves, touching on applications to moduli spaces.

There is no general h-principle for Legendrian embeddings in contact manifolds. In dimension 3, however, Legendrian knots in the complement of an overtwisted disc, which are called loose, satisfy an h-principle. We will discuss the high dimensional analog of loose knots.

The talk is meant to be a gentle introduction to a part of combinatorial topology which studies randomly generated objects. It is a rapidly developing field which combines elements of topology, geometry, and probability with plethora of interesting ideas, results and problems which have their roots in combinatorics and linear algebra.

For many problems in science and engineering, one needs to quantitatively compare shapes of objects in images, e.g., anatomical structures in medical images, detected objects in images of natural scenes. One might have large databases of such shapes, and may want to cluster, classify or compare such elements. To be able to perform such analyses, one needs the notion of shape distance quantifying dissimilarity of such entities. In this work, we focus on the elastic shape distance of Srivastava et al. [PAMI, 2011] for closed planar curves. This provides a flexible and intuitive geodesic distance measure between curve shapes in an appropriate shape space, invariant to translation, scaling, rotation and reparametrization. Computing this distance, however, is computationally expensive. The original algorithm proposed by Srivastava et al. using dynamic programming runs in cubic time with respect to the number of nodes per curve. In this work, we propose a new fast hybrid iterative algorithm to compute the elastic shape distance between shapes of closed planar curves. The asymptotic time complexity of our iterative algorithm is O(N log(N)) per iteration. However, in our experiments, we have observed almost a linear trend in the total running times depending on the type of curve data.