Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk we consider the contact embeddings of contact 3-manifolds to S^5 with the standard contact structure.Every closed 3-manifold can be embedded to S^5 smoothly by Wall's theorem. The only known necessary condition to a contact embedding to the standard S^5 is the triviality of the Euler class of the contact structure. On the other hand there are not so much examples of contact embeddings.I will explain the systematic construction of contact embeddings of some contact structures (containing non Stein fillable ones) on torus bundles and Lens spaces.If time permits I will explain relation between above construction and some polynomials on \mathbb C^3.

In this talk, we will discuss a question posed by Vladimir Arnold some twenty years ago, in a subject he called "dynamics of intersections." In the simplest setting, the question is the following: given a (discrete time) holomorphic dynamical system on a complex manifold X and two holomorphic curves C and D in X which pass through a fixed point P of the system, how quickly can the local intersection multiplicies at P of C with the iterates of D grow in time? Questions like this arise naturally, for instance, when trying to count the periodic points of a dynamical system. Arnold conjectured that this sequence of intersection multiplicities can grow at most exponentially fast, and in fact we can show this conjecture is true if the curves are chosen to be suitably generic. However, as we will see, for some (even very simple) dynamical systems one can choose curves so that the intersection multiplicities grow as fast as desired. We will see how to construct such counterexamples to Arnold's conjecture, using geometric ideas going back to work of Yoshikazu Yamagishi.

In this talk we will consider a finite sample of i.i.d. random variables which are uniformly distributed in some convex body in R^d. We will propose several estimators of the support, depending on the information that is available about this set: for instance, it may be a polytope, with known or unknown number of vertices. These estimators will be studied in a minimax setup, and minimax rates of convergence will be given.

When does the spectrum of an operator determine the operator uniquely?-This question and its many versions have been studied extensively in the field of inverse spectral theory for differential operators. Several notable mathematicians have worked in this area. Among others, there are important contributions by Borg, Levinson, Hochstadt, Liebermann; and more recently by Simon, Gesztezy, del Rio and Horvath, which have further fueled these studies by relating the completeness problems of families of functions to the inverse spectral problems of the Schr ̈odinger operator. In this talk, we will discuss the role played by the Toeplitz kernel approach in answering some of these questions, as described by Makarov and Poltoratski. We will also describe some new results using this approach. This is joint work with Mishko Mitkovski.