Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will discuss how the idea of coupling at time infinity is equivalent to unique ergodicity of a markov process. In general, the coupling will be a kind of "asymptotic Wasserstein" coupling. I will draw examples from SDEs with memory and SPDEs. The fact that both are infinite dimensional markov processes is no coincidence.

First-Fit is an online algorithm that partitions the elements of a poset into chains. When presented with a new element x, First-Fit adds x to the first chain whose elements are all comparable to x. In 2004, Pemmaraju, Raman, and Varadarajan introduced the Column Construction Method to prove that when P is an interval order of width w, First-Fit partitions P into at most 10w chains. This bound was subsequently improved to 8w by Brightwell, Kierstead, and Trotter, and independently by Narayanaswamy and Babu. The poset r+s is the disjoint union of a chain of size r and a chain of size s. A poset is an interval order if and only if it does not contain 2+2 as an induced subposet. Bosek, Krawczyk, and Szczypka proved that if P is an (r+r)-free poset of width w, then First-Fit partitions P into at most 3rw^2 chains and asked whether the bound can be improved from O(w^2) to O(w). We answer this question in the affirmative. By generalizing the Column Construction Method, we show that if P is an (r+s)-free poset of width w, then First-Fit partitions P into at most 8(r-1)(s-1)w chains. This is joint work with Gwena\"el Joret.

This talk is about a random Schroedinger operator describing the dynamics of an electron in a randomly deformed lattice. The periodic displacement configurations which minimize the bottom of the spectrum are characterized. This leads to an amusing problem about minimizing eigenvalues of a Neumann Schroedinger operator with respect to the position of the potential. While this configuration is essentially unique for dimension greater than one, there are infinitely many different minimizing configurations in the one-dimensional case. This is joint work with Jeff Baker, Frederic Klopp, Shu Nakamura and Guenter Stolz.

An n-dimensional topological quantum field theory is a functor from the category of closed, oriented (n-1)-manifolds and n-dimensional cobordisms to the category of vector spaces and linear maps. Three and four dimensional TQFTs can be difficult to describe, but provide interesting invariants of n-manifolds and are the subjects of ongoing research. This talk focuses on the simpler case n=2, where TQFTs turn out to be equivalent, as categories, to Frobenius algebras. I'll introduce the two structures -- one topological, one algebraic -- explicitly describe the correspondence, and give some examples.