Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We will present an introduction to gauge theory and classical Chern-Simons theory, a 3-dimensional topological gauge field theory whose quantization yields new insights about knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. Then we will give a sketch of quantum Chern-Simons theory and how Witten used it as a 3-dimensional method to obtain the Jones polynomial, as well as how it may be used to obtain other powerful knot and 3-manifold invariants. No physics background is necessary.

The linear programming discriminant(LPD) estimator is used in sparse linear discriminant analysis for high dimensional classification problems. In this talk we will give a sufficient condition for the variable selection property of the LPD estimator and our result provides optimal bound on the requirement of sample size $n$ and magnitude of components of Bayes direction.

We explain a method for the computation of normally hyperbolic invariant manifolds (NHIM) in discrete dynamical systems.The method is based in finding a parameterization for the manifold formulating a functional equation. We solve the invariance equation using a Newton-like method taking advantage of the dynamics and the geometry of the invariant manifold and its invariant bundles. The method allows us to compute a NHIM and its internal dynamics, which is a-priori unknown.We implement this method to continue the invariant manifold with respect to parameters, and to explore different mechanisms of breakdown. This is a joint work with Alex Haro.

I will give an introduction to the method of Chabauty-Coleman for finding rational points on curves.