Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The Jordan curve theorem states that any simple closed curve decomposes the 2-sphere into two connected components and is their common boundary. Schönflies strengthened this result by showing that the closure of either connected component in the 2-sphere is a 2-cell. While the first statement is true in higher dimensions, the latter is not. However under the additional hypothesis of locally flatness, the closure of either connected component is an n-cell. This result is called the Generalized Schönflies theorem, and was proved independently by Morton Brown and Barry Mazur. In this talk, I will describe the proof of due to Morton Brown.

Many biological soft tissues exhibit complex interactions between passive biophysical or biomechanical mechanisms, and active physiological responses. These interactions affect the ability of the tissue to remodel in order to maintain homeostasis, or govern alterations in tissue properties with aging or disease. In tissue engineering applications, such interactions also influence the relationship between design parameters and functional outcomes. In this talk, I will discuss two mathematical modeling problems in this general area. The first problem addresses biosynthesis and linking of articular cartilage extracellular matrix in cell-seeded scaffolds. A mixture approach is employed to, inherently, capture effects of evolving porosity in the tissue-engineered construct. We develop a hybrid model in which cells are represented, individually, as inclusions within a continuum reaction-diffusion model formulated on a representative domain. The second problem addresses structural remodeling of cardiovascular vessel walls in the presence of pulmonary hypertension (PH). As PH advances, the relative composition of collagen, elastin and smooth muscle cells in the cardiovascular network becomes altered. The ensuing wall stiffening increases blood pressure which, in turn, can induce further vessel wall remodeling. Yet, the manner in which these alterations occur is not well understood. I will discuss structural continuum mechanics models that incorporate PH-induced remodeling of the vessel wall into 1D fluid-structure models of pulmonary cardiovascular networks. A Holzapfel-Gasser-Ogden (HGO)-type hyperelastic constitutive law for combined bending, inflation, extension and torsion of a nonlinear elastic tube is employed. Specifically, we are interested in formulating new, nonlinear relations between blood pressure and vessel wall cross-sectional area that reflect structural alterations with advancing PH.

I will explain how to explicitly compute the syntomic regulator for varieties over $p$-adic fields, recently developed by Nekovar and Niziol, in terms of Vologodsky integration. The formulas are the same as in the good reduction case that I found almost 20 years ago. The two key ingrediants are the understanding of Vologodsky integration in terms of Coleman integration developed in my work with Zerbes and techniques for understanding the log-syntomic regulators for curves with semi-stable reduction in terms of the smooth locus.

A fundamental problem in compressive sensing (CS) is to reconstruct a sparse signal under a few linear measurements far less than the physical dimension of the signal. Currently, CS favors incoherent systems, in which any two measurements are as little correlated as possible. In reality, however, many problems are coherent, in which case conventional methods, such as L1 minimization, do not work well. In this talk, I will present a novel non-convex approach, which is to minimize the difference of L1 and L2 norms, denoted as L1-L2, in order to promote sparsity. In addition to theoretical aspects of the L1-L2 approach, I will discuss two minimization algorithms. One is the difference of convex (DC) function methodology, and the other is based on a proximal operator, which makes some L1 algorithms (e.g. ADMM) applicable for L1-L2. Experiments demonstrate that L1-L2 improves L1 consistently and it outperforms Lp (p between 0 and 1) for highly coherent matrices. Some applications will be discussed, including super-resolution, image processing, and low-rank approximation.