Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The talk concerns the mathematical aspects of solitary waves (i.e. single hump waves) moving with a constant speed on water of finite depth with surface tension using fully nonlinear Euler equations governing the motion of the fluid flow. The talk will first give a quick formal derivation of the solitary-wave solutions from the Euler equations and then focus on the mathematical theory of existence and stability of two-dimensional solitary waves. The recent development on the existence and stability of various three-dimensional waves will also be discussed.

The first hour of this talk gives a gentle introduction to yet another version of Heegaard Floer homology; Sutured Floer homology. This is the generalization of Heegaard Floer homology, for 3-manifolds with decorations (sutures) on their boundary. Sutures come naturally for contact 3-manifolds. Later we will concentrate on invariants for contact 3--manifolds in Heegaard Floer homology. This can be defined both for closed 3--manifolds, in this case they live in Heegaard Floer homology and for 3--manifolds with boundary, when the invariant is in sutured Floer homology. There are two natural generalizations of these invariants for Legendrain knots. One can directly generalize the definition of the contact invariant $\widehat{\mathcal{L}}$, or one can take the complement of the knot, and compute the invariant for that:$\textrm{EH}$. At the end of this talk I would like to describe a map that sends $\textrm{EH}$ to$\widehat{\mathcal{L}}$. This is a joint work with Andr\'as Stipsicz.

In this talk we consider the collective dynamics of a network of interacting dynamical systems and show that under certain conditions such dynamical networks have a unique global attractor. This involves a combination of techniques from dynamical systems theory as well as newly devised methods in graph theory. However, this talk is intended to be an introduction to both areas of mathematics with a focus on how the combination of the two is yielding new results in graph and dynamical systems theory.

In the 1930's, Tarski introduced his plank problem at a time when the field Discrete Geometry was about to born. It is quite remarkable that Tarski's question and its variants continue to generate interest in the geometric and analytic aspects of coverings by planks in the present time as well. The talk is of a survey type with some new results and with a list of open problems on the discrete geometric side of the plank problem.