Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In 2006, my coadvisor Xiaoming Huo and his colleague published an annal of statistics paper which designs an asymptotically powerful testing algorithm to detect the potential curvilinear structure in a messy point cloud image. However, such an algorithm involves a membership threshold and a decision threshold which are not well defined in that paper because the distribution of LSP was unknown. Later on, Xiaoming's student Chen, Jihong found some connections between the distribution of LSP and the so-called Erdos-Renyi law. In some sense, the distribution of LSP is just a generalization of the Erdos-Renyi law. However this JASA paper of Chen, Jihong had some restrictions and only partially found out the distribution of LSP. In this talk, I will show the result of the JASA paper is actually very close to the distribution of LSP. However, these is still much potential work to do in order to strengthen this algorithm.

Finding ground states of spin glasses, a model of disordered materials, has a deep connection to many hard combinatorial optimization problems, such as satisfiability, maxcut, graph-bipartitioning, and coloring. Much insight has been gained for the combinatorial problems from the intuitive approaches developed in physics (such as replica theory and the cavity method), some of which have been proven rigorously recently. I present a treasure trove of numerical data obtained with heuristic methods that suggest a number conjectures, such as an equivalence between maxcut and bipartitioning for r-regular graphs, a simple relation for their optimal configurations as a function of degree r, and anomalous extreme-value fluctuations in a variety of models, hotly debated in physics currently. For some, such as those related to finite-size effects, not even a physics theory exists, for others theory exists that calls for rigorous methods.

The large-time behavior of solutions to Burgers equation with small viscosity isdescribed using invariant manifolds. In particular, a geometric explanation is provided for aphenomenon known as metastability, which in the present context means that solutions spend avery long time near the family of solutions known as diffusive N-waves before finallyconverging to a stable self-similar diffusion wave. More precisely, it is shown that in termsof similarity, or scaling, variables in an algebraically weighted L^2 space, theself-similar diffusion waves correspond to a one-dimensional global center manifold ofstationary solutions. Through each of these fixed points there exists a one-dimensional,global, attractive, invariant manifold corresponding to the diffusive N-waves. Thus,metastability corresponds to a fast transient in which solutions approach this ``metastable"manifold of diffusive N-waves, followed by a slow decay along this manifold, and, finally,convergence to the self-similar diffusion wave. This is joint work with C. Eugene Wayne.