Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The bispectral problem concerns the construction and the classification of operators possessing a symmetry between the space and spectral variables. Different versions of this problem can be solved using techniques from integrable systems, algebraic geometry, representation theory, classical orthogonal polynomials, etc. I will review the problem and some of these connections and then discuss new results related to the generic quantum superintegrable system on the sphere.

The function field case of the strong uniform boundedness conjecturefor torsion points on elliptic curves reduces to showing thatclassical modular curves have gonality tending to infinity.We prove an analogue for periodic points of polynomials under iterationby studying the geometry of analogous curves called dynatomic curves.This is joint work with John R. Doyle.

Cutoff is a remarkable property of many Markov chains in which they rapidly transition from an unmixed to a mixed distribution. Most random walks on the symmetric group, also known as card shuffles, are believed to mix with cutoff, but we are far from being able to proof this. We will survey existing cutoff results and techniques for random walks on the symmetric group, and present three recent results: cutoff for a biased transposition walk, cutoff for the random-to-random card shuffle (answering a 2001 conjecture of Diaconis), and pre-cutoff for the involution walk, generated by permutations with a binomially distributed number of two-cycles. The results use either probabilistic techniques such as strong stationary times or diagonalization through algebraic combinatorics and representation theory of the symmetric group. Includes joint work with Nayantara Bhatnagar, Evita Nestoridi, and Igor Pak.

During the last few years there has been a systematic pursuit for sharp estimates of the energy components of atomic systems in terms of their single particle density. The common feature of these estimates is that they include corrections that depend on the gradient of the density. In this talk I will review these results. The most recent result is the sharp estimate of P.T. Nam on the kinetic energy. Towards the end of my talk I will present some recent results concerning geometric estimates for generalized Poincaré inequalities obtained in collaboration with C. Vallejos and H. Van Den Bosch. These geometric estimates are a useful tool to estimate the numerical value of the constant of Nam's gradient correction term.