Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We study the structure of the stable coefficients of the Jones polynomial of an alternating link. We start by identifying the first four stable coefficients with polynomial invariants of a (reduced) Tait graph of the link projection. This leads us to introduce a free polynomial algebra of invariants of graphs whose elements give invariants of alternating links which strictly refine the first four stable coefficients. We conjecture that all stable coefficients are elements of this algebra, and give experimental evidence for the fifth and sixth stable coefficient. We illustrate our results in tables of all alternating links with at most 10 crossings and all irreducible planar graphs with at most 6 vertices.

Let G be an abelian group. A subset A of G is a Sidon set if A has the property that no sum of two elements of A is equal to another sum of two elements of A. These sets have a rich history in combinatorial number theory and frequently appear in the problem papers of Erdos. In this talk we will discuss some results in which Sidon sets were used to solve problems in extremal graph theory. This is joint work with Mike Tait and Jacques Verstraete.

We will introduce a PDE model to investigate how epidemic metrics, such as the basic reproductive ratio R_0 and infection prevalence, depend on a pathogen's virulence. We define virulence as all harm inflicted on the host by the pathogen, so it includes direct virulence (increased host mortality and decreased fecundity) and indirect virulence (increased predation on infected hosts). To study these effects we use a Daphnia-parasite disease system. Daphnia are freshwater crustaceans that get infected while feeding, by consuming free-living parasite spores. These spores after they are ingested, they start reproducing within the host and the host eventually dies. Dead hosts decay releasing the spores they contain back in the water column. Visual predators, such as fish, can detect infected hosts easier because they become opaque, hence they prey preferentially on them. Our model includes two host classes (susceptible and infected), the free-living propagules, and the food resource (algae). Using experimental data, we obtain the qualitative curves for the dependence of disease-induced mortality and fecundity reduction on the age of infection. Among other things, we will show that in order the predator to keep the host population healthy, it needs to (i) detect the infected hosts very soon after they become infected and (ii) show very high preference on consuming them in comparison to the uninfected hosts. In order to address questions about the evolution of virulence, we will also discuss how we defined the invasion fitness for this compartmental model. We will finish with some pairwise invasibility plots, that show when a mutant strain can invade the resident strain in this disease system.

We consider a diffusion on a potential landscape which is given by a smooth Hamiltonian in the regime of small noise. We give a new proof of the Eyring-Kramers formula for the spectral gap of the associated generator of the diffusion. The proof is based on a refinement of the two-scale approach introduced by Grunewald, Otto, Villani, and Westdickenberg and of the mean-difference estimate introduced by Chafai and Malrieu. The Eyring-Kramers formula follows as a simple corollary from two main ingredients : The first one shows that the Gibbs measure restricted to a domain of attraction has a "good" Poincaré constant mimicking the fast convergence of the diffusion to metastable states. The second ingredient is the estimation of the mean-difference by a new weighted transportation distance. It contains the main contribution of the spectral gap, resulting from exponential long waiting times of jumps between metastable states of the diffusion. This new approach also allows to derive sharp estimates on the log-Sobolev constant. This is joint work with Andre Schlichting.