Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The Abelian sandpile was invented as a "self-organized critical" model whose stationary behavior is similar to that of a classical statistical mechanical system at a critical point. On the d-dimensional lattice, many variables measuring correlations in the sandpile are expected to exhibit power-law decay. Among these are various measures of the size of an avalanche when a grain is added at stationarity: the probability that a particular site topples in an avalanche, the diameter of an avalanche, and the number of sites toppled in an avalanche. Various predictions about these exist in the physics literature, but relatively little is known rigorously. We provide some power-law upper and lower bounds for these avalanche size variables and a new approach to the question of stabilizability in two dimensions.

In my talk, I will discuss coordinate shifts acting on Dirichlet spaces on the bidisk and the problem of finding cyclic vectors for these operators. For polynomials in two complex variables, I will describe a complete characterization given in terms of size and nature of zero sets in the distinguished boundary.

Spatially discrete stochastic models have been implemented to analyze cooperative behavior in a variety of biological, ecological, sociological, physical, and chemical systems. In these models, species of different types, or individuals in different states, reside at the sites of a periodic spatial grid. These sites change or switch state according to specific rules (reflecting birth or death, migration, infection, etc.) In this talk, we consider a spatial epidemic model where a population of sick or healthy individual resides on an infinite square lattice. Sick individuals spontaneously recover at rate *p*, and healthy individual become infected at rate O(1) if they have two or more sick neighbors. As *p* increases, the model exhibits a discontinuous transition from an infected to an all healthy state. Relative stability of the two states is assessed by exploring the propagation of planar interfaces separating them (i.e., planar waves of infection or recovery). We find that the condition for equistability or coexistence of the two states (i.e., stationarity of the interface) depends on orientation of the interface. We analyze this stochastic model by applying truncation approximations to the exact master equations describing the evolution of spatially non-uniform states. We thereby obtain a set of discrete (or lattice) reaction-diffusion type equations amenable to numerical analysis.

We will review the notion of Whitney differentiability and the Whitney embedding theorem. Then, we will also review its applications in KAM theory.