Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This Colloquium will be Part II of the Stelson Lecture. A function of many variables, when chosen at random, is typically very complex. It has an exponentially large number of local minima or maxima, or critical points. It defines a very complex landscape, the topology of its level lines (for instance their Euler characteristic) is surprisingly complex. This complex picture is valid even in very simple cases, for random homogeneous polynomials of degree p larger than 2. This has important consequences. For instance trying to find the minimum value of such a function may thus be very difficult. The mathematical tool suited to understand this complexity is the spectral theory of large random matrices. The classification of the different types of complexity has been understood for a few decades in the statistical physics of disordered media, and in particular spin-glasses, where the random functions may define the energy landscapes. It is also relevant in many other fields, including computer science and Machine learning. I will review recent work with collaborators in mathematics (A. Auffinger, J. Cerny) , statistical physics (C. Cammarota, G. Biroli, Y. Fyodorov, B. Khoruzenko), and computer science (Y. LeCun and his team at Facebook, A. Choromanska, L. Sagun among others), as well as recent work of E. Subag and E.Subag and O.Zeitouni.

The incompressible three-dimensional Euler equations are a basic model of fluid mechanics. Although these equations are more than 200 years old, many fundamental questions remain unanswered, most notably if smooth solutions can form singularities in finite time. In this talk, I discuss recent progress towards proving a finite time blowup for the Euler equations, inspired numerical work by T. Hou and G. Luo and analytical results by A. Kiselev and V. Sverak. My main focus lies on various model equations of fluid mechanics that isolate and capture possible mechanisms for singularity formation. An important theme is to achieve finite-time blowup in a controlled manner using the hyperbolic flow scenario in one and two space dimensions. This talk is based on joint work with B. Orcan-Ekmecki, M. Radosz, and H. Yang.

In this lecture series, held jointly (via video conference) with the University of Buffalo and the University of Arkansas, we aim to understand the lecture notes by Vincent Guirardel on geometric small cancellation: https://perso.univ-rennes1.fr/vincent.guirardel/papiers/lecture_notes_pc...