Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will discuss the theory of chip-firing games, focusing on the interplay between chip-firing games and potential theory on graphs. To motivate the discussion, I will give a new proof of "the pentagon game". I will discuss the concept of reduced divisors and various related algorithmic aspects of the theory. If time permits I will also give some applications, including an "efficient bijective" proof of Kirchhoff's matrix-tree theorem.

Granville and Soundararajan have recently introduced thenotion of pretentiousness in the study of multiplicative functions ofmodulus bounded by 1, essentially the idea that two functions whichare similar in a precise sense should exhibit similar behavior. Itturns out, somewhat surprisingly, that this does not directly extendto detecting power cancellation - there are multiplicative functionswhich exhibit as much cancellation as possible in their partial sumsthat, modified slightly, give rise to functions which exhibit almostas little as possible. We develop two new notions of pretentiousnessunder which power cancellation can be detected, one of which appliesto a much broader class of multiplicative functions. This work isjoint with Junehyuk Jung.

One of the challenges in modeling the transport properties of complex fluids (e.g. many biofluids, polymer solutions, particle suspensions) is describing the interaction between the suspended micro-structure with the fluid itself. Here I will focus on understanding the dynamics of semi-dilute active suspensions, like swimming bacteria or artificial micro-swimmers modeled via a simple kinetic model neglecting chemical gradients and particle collisions. I will then present recent results on the linearized structure of such an active system near a state of uniformity and isotropy and on the onset of the instability as a function of the volume concentration of swimmers, both for a periodic domain. Finally, I will discuss the role of the domain geometry in driving the flow and the large-scale flow instabilities, as well as the appropriate boundary conditions.

In fluid dynamics, one of the most classical issues is to understand the dynamics of viscous fluid flows past solid bodies (e.g., aircrafts, ships, etc...), especially in the regime of very high Reynolds numbers (or small viscosity). Boundary layers are typically formed in a thin layer near the boundary. In this talk, I shall present various ill-posedness results on the classical Prandtl equation, and discuss the relevance of boundary-layer expansions and the vanishing viscosity limit problem of the Navier-Stokes equations. I will also discuss viscosity effects in destabilizing stable inviscid flows.