Seminars and Colloquia by Series

A combinatorial model for higher tropical Grassmannians

Series
Representation Theory, Moduli, and Physics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, February 17, 2026 - 13:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Nick EarlyInstitute for Advanced Study

The tropical Grassmannian Trop G(k,n), introduced by Speyer and Sturmfels, parametrizes tropical linear spaces in tropical projective space. For k=2, it can be identified with the space of phylogenetic trees. Beyond applications to mathematical biology, it has seen striking new connections in physics to generalized scattering amplitudes via the CEGM framework.

Despite this, constructing a combinatorial model for the positive tropical Grassmannian at higher k has remained an open problem. I will describe such a model built from the planar basis, a distinguished basis of the space of tropical Plücker vectors whose elements are rays of the positive tropical Grassmannian, together with a duality between tropical u-variables and noncrossing tableaux, which provides an explicit inverse to the Speyer–Williams parameterization. For k=3, the model connects to SL(3) representation theory via a cross-ratio formula that computes tropical invariants directly from non-elliptic webs, and to CAT(0) geometry via diskoids in affine buildings.

Based on joint work with Thomas Lam.

4-ended Tangles, Heegaard Floer Homology, and Norm Detection

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, February 16, 2026 - 16:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Boyd 322, University of Georgia
Speaker
Fraser BinnsPrinceton

Link Floer homology is a powerful invariant of links due to Ozsváth and Szabó. One of its most striking properties is that it detects each link's Thurston norm, a result also due to Ozsváth and Szabó. In this talk I will discuss generalizations of this result to the context of 4-ended tangles, as well as some tangle detection results. This is joint work in progress with Subhankar Dey and Claudius Zibrowius.

Real Heegaard Floer homology and localization

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, February 16, 2026 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
UGA Boyd 322
Speaker
Kristen HendricksRutgers

In the past few years there have been a host of remarkable topological results arising from considering "real" versions of various gauge and Floer-theoretic invariants of three- and four-dimensional manifolds equipped with involutions. Recently Guth and Manolescu defined a real version of Lagrangian Floer theory, and applied it to Ozsváth and Szabó's three-manifold invariant Heegaard Floer homology, producing an invariant called real Heegaard Floer homology associated to a 3-manifold together with an orientation-preserving involution whose fixed set is codimension two (for example a branched double cover). We review the construction of real Heegaard Floer theory and use tools from equivariant Lagrangian Floer theory, originally developed by Seidel-Smith and Large in a somewhat different context, to produce a spectral sequence from the ordinary to real Heegaard Floer homologies in their simplest "hat" version, in particular proving the existence of a rank inequality between the theories. Our results apply more generally to the real Lagrangian Floer homology of exact symplectic manifolds with antisymplectic involutions. Along the way we give a little history and context for this kind of result in Heegaard Floer theory. This is a series of two talks; the first "prep" talk will discuss some background and context that might be helpful to (for example) graduate students in attendance.

Approximation of intrinsic Hölder functions on manifolds by ambient Gaussian kernels

Series
Applied and Computational Mathematics Seminar
Time
Monday, February 16, 2026 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005 and https://gatech.zoom.us/j/94954654170
Speaker
Xiuyuan ChengDuke University

We study approximation properties of Gaussian reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces restricted to low-dimensional manifolds embedded in Euclidean space. Using only ambient Gaussian kernels, and without assuming any smooth ambient extensions or estimating geometric quantities of the manifold, we show that intrinsically defined Hölder functions on the manifold can be approximated at rates governed by intrinsic dimension and smoothness. The construction is based on a small-scale expansion in real space rather than a spectral representation. As an application, we obtain adaptive nonparametric convergence rates for Gaussian process regression on manifolds, where the regression procedure itself is unchanged and intrinsic adaptivity results from the approximation analysis.

Linear algebra over hyperfields, and an application of the Topological Representation Theorem for oriented matroids

Series
Algebra Seminar
Time
Monday, February 16, 2026 - 13:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Chayim LowenPrinceton University

Please Note: There will be a pre-seminar at 10:55-11:25 in Skiles 005. The speaker will propose a discussion of the relationship of fields to hyperfields and interesting examples of matroids of small rank (over nice hyperfields).

The Plücker embedding exhibits the Grassmannian Gr(r, n) as a closed subvariety of projective space. A theorem of Hodge shows that its homogeneous ideal has as a quadratic Gröbner basis the so-called multiple-exchange relations between Plücker coordinates. Since the set of these polynomials is quite large and unwieldy, it is often preferable to work with a smaller set of single-exchange Plücker relations. An even smaller set of polynomials is the collection of local (or 3-term) exchange relations. We will recall and clarify the relationships between these three. We go on to examine the situation over hyperfields. In their pioneering work, Baker and Bowler showed that the theories of matroids, oriented matroids, valuated matroids etc. can be collectively understood under a common banner as the theory of Grassmanians over hyperfields. Their work gives a good accounting of the relationship between single- and local-exchange relations in this generalized setting. We will discuss what can be said about the multiple-exchange relations. This leads to considerations of elementary linear-algebraic facts in the hyperfield setting. All results may be suitably extended to the flag setting---which we will discuss, time permitting. The talk is based on joint work with Nathan Bowler and Changxin Ding.

Proximal Optimal Transport Divergences and Stable Gradient Flows

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, February 12, 2026 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Markos KatsoulakisUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst

We introduce proximal optimal transport divergences that provide a unifying variational framework interpolating between classical f-divergences and Wasserstein metrics. From a gradient-flow perspective, these divergences generate stable and robust dynamics in probability space, enabling the learning of distributions with singular structure, including strange attractors, extreme events, and low-dimensional manifolds, with provable guarantees in sample size.

We illustrate how this mathematical structure leads naturally to generative particle flows for reconstructing nonlinear cellular dynamics from snapshot single-cell RNA sequencing data,including real patient datasets, highlighting the role of proximal regularization in stabilizing learning and inference in high dimensions.

Bio: Markos Katsoulakis is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and an Adjunct Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at UMass Amherst,  whose research lies at the interface of PDEs, uncertainty quantification, scientific machine learning, and information theory. He serves on the editorial boards of the SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and the SIAM Mathematical Modeling and Computation book series. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University and his B.Sc. from the University of Athens. His work has been supported by AFOSR, DARPA, NSF, DOE, and the ERC.

On the Stabilizing Effect of Fluid Expansion for Relativistic Gaseous Stars

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, February 10, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 254
Speaker
Zhongtian HuPrinceton University

It is well-known that a spacetime which expands sufficiently fast can stabilize the fluid for relativistic/Einstein-fluid systems. One may wonder whether the expansion of the fluid, instead of the background spacetime geometry, is also able to achieve a similar stabilizing effect. As an attempt to address this question, we consider the free boundary relativistic Euler equations in Minkowski background M1+3 equipped with a physical vacuum boundary, which models the motion of relativistic gas. For the class of isentropic, barotropic, and polytropic gas, we construct an open class of initial data which launch future-global solutions. Such solutions are spherically symmetric, have small initial density, and expand asymptotically linearly in time. In particular, the asymptotic rate of expansion is allowed to be arbitrarily close to the speed of light. Therefore, our main result is far from a perturbation of existing results concerning the classical Euler counterparts. This is joint work with Marcelo Disconzi and Chenyun Luo.

On sections of Lefschetz fibrations over the disk

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, February 9, 2026 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Riccardo PedrottiUMass Amherst

I'll report on an ongoing project, partly joint work with J. Hillman, aimed at finding criteria for the existence of sections on a given Lefschetz fibration over a surface. We will start by presenting a nice algebraic criterion for the existence of sections in a surface bundle and explain what goes wrong if we try to apply it to the more general Lefschetz fibration case. The question of when a nullhomotopic loop in the boundary of a Lefschetz fibration over the disk can be extended to a section over the whole disk is one such subtle issue. Our computations suggest that working with continuous or smooth sections leads to different answers.

Degenerations and Uniformity

Series
Algebra Seminar
Time
Monday, February 9, 2026 - 13:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Jit Wu YapMassachusetts Institute of Technology

Please Note: There will be a pre-seminar at 10:55-11:25 in Skiles 005.

Rescaling limits were first introduced by Jan Kiwi to study degenerations of rational maps of degree at least two. Building on the work of Luo and Favre–Gong, we explain how rescaling limits can serve as a substitute for a good compactification of $Rat_d$, the moduli space of degree d rational maps. In particular, this framework allows one to promote pointwise results to uniform statements in a systematic way. 

Exact threshold for non-linear Hamilton cycles

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Friday, February 6, 2026 - 15:15 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Byron ChinMIT

For positive integers $r > \ell \geq 1$, an $\ell$-cycle in an $r$-uniform hypergraph is a cycle where each edge consists of $r$ vertices and each pair of consecutive edges intersect in $\ell$ vertices. For $\ell \geq 2$, we determine the exact threshold for the appearance of Hamilton $\ell$-cycles in an Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi random hypergraph, confirming a conjecture of Narayanan and Schacht. The main difficulty is that the second moment is not tight for these structures. I’ll discuss how a variant of small subgraph conditioning and a subsampling procedure overcome this difficulty.

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