Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Applications of diffusion models to sequential decision making

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 12:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 171
Speaker
Yuri Bakhtin – School of Mathematics - Georgia Institute of Technology

Please Note: Hosts: Yao Li and Ricardo Restrepo

I will consider mathematical models of decision making based on dynamics in the neighborhood of unstable equilibria and involving random perturbations due to small noise. I will report results on the vanishing noise limit for these systems, providing precise predictions about the statistics of decision making times and sequences of unstable equilibria visited by the process. Mathematically, the results are based on the analysis of random Poincare maps in the neighborhood of each equilibrium point. I will discuss applications to neuroscience and psychology along with some experimental data.

Network Models for Infectious Disease Dynamics

Series
Mathematical Biology Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 169
Speaker
Shweta Bansal – Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Penn State
Many infectious agents spread via close contact between infected and susceptible individuals. The nature and structure of interactions among individuals is thus of fundamental importance to the spread of infectious disease. Heterogeneities among host interactions can be modeled with contact networks, and analyzed using tools of percolation theory. Thus far, the field of contact network epidemiology has largely been focused on the impact of network structure on the progression of disease epidemics. In this talk, we introduce network models which incorporate feedback of the disease spread on network structure, and explore how this feedback limits the potential for future outbreaks. This has implications for seasonal diseases such as influenza, and supports the need for more adaptive public health policies in response to disease dynamics.

Analytification is the Limit of All Tropicalizations

Series
Tropical Geometry Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 10:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 114
Speaker
Ye Luo – Georgia Tech
We introduce extended tropicalizations for closed subvarieties of toric varieties and show that the analytification of a quasprojective variety over a nonarchimedean field is naturally homeomorphic to the inverse limit of the tropicalizations of its quasiprojective embeddings. This talk is based on a paper of Sam Pyane with the same title.

Turbulence: a walk on the wild side

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, September 28, 2010 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Prof. Predrag Cvitanović – Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology –
In the world of moderate Reynolds number, everyday turbulence of fluids flowing across planes and down pipes a velvet revolution is taking place. Experiments are almost as detailed as the numerical simulations, DNS is yielding exact numerical solutions that one dared not dream about a decade ago, and dynamical systems visualization of turbulent fluid's state space geometry is unexpectedly elegant. We shall take you on a tour of this newly breached, hitherto inaccessible territory. Mastery of fluid mechanics is no prerequisite, and perhaps a hindrance: the talk is aimed at anyone who had ever wondered why - if no cloud is ever seen twice - we know a cloud when we see one? And how do we turn that into mathematics? (Joint work with J. F. Gibson)

Surgery Formulas and Heegaard Floer Homology of Mapping Tori

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, September 27, 2010 - 17:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Evan Fink – University of Georgia

Please Note: This is the second talk in the Emory-Ga Tech-UGA joint seminar. The first talk will begin at 3:45.

There are many conjectured connections between Heegaard Floer homology and the various homologies appearing in low dimensional topology and symplectic geometry. One of these conjectures states, roughly, that if \phi is a diffeomorphism of a closed Riemann surface, a certain portion of the Heegaard Floer homology of the mapping torus of \phi should be equal to the Symplectic Floer homology of \phi. I will discuss how this can be confirmed when \phi is periodic (i.e., when some iterate of \phi is the identity map). I will recall how a mapping torus can be realized via Dehn surgery; then, I will sketch how the surgery long exact triangles of Heegaard Floer homology can be distilled into more direct surgery formulas involving knot Floer homology. Finally, I'll say a few words about what actually happens when you use these formulas for the aforementioned Dehn surgeries: a "really big game of tic-tac-toe".

HOMFLY-PT polynomial and Legendrian links in the solid torus

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, September 27, 2010 - 15:45 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Dan Rutherford – Duke University

Please Note: This is the first talk in the Emory-Ga Tech-UGA joint seminar. The second talk will follow at 5.

A smooth knot in a contact 3-manifold is called Legendrian if it is always tangent to the contact planes. In this talk, I will discuss Legendrian knots in R^3 and the solid torus where knots can be conveniently viewed using their `front projections'. In particular, I will describe how certain decompositions of front projections known as `normal rulings' (introduced by Fuchs and Chekanov-Pushkar) can be used to give combinatorial descriptions for parts of the HOMFLY-PT and Kauffman polynomials. I will conclude by discussing recent generalizations to Legendrian solid torus links. It is usual to identify the `HOMFLY-PT skein module' of the solid torus with the ring of symmetric functions. In this context, normal rulings can be used to give a knot theory description of the standard scalar product determined by taking the Schur functions to form an orthonormal basis.

Theory and applications of fractal transformations

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, September 27, 2010 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Michael Barnsley – Department of Mathematics, Australian National University
Let A and B be attractors of two point-fibred iterated function systems with coding maps f and g. A transformations from A into B can be constructed by composing a branch of the inverse of f with g. I will outline the shape of the theory of such transformations, which are termed "fractal" because their graphs are typically of non-integer dimension. I will also describe the remarkable geometry of these transformations when the generating iterated functions systems are projective. Finally, I will show how they can be used to provide new insights into dynamical systems and also how they can be used to manipulate, filter, process and efficiently store digital images, and how they can be used in image synthesis, leading to applications in the visual arts.

Crossings and nestings of two edges in set partitions

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Friday, September 24, 2010 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Svetlana Poznanovikj – SoM, Georgia Tech
A set partition of [n] can be represented graphically by drawing n dots on a horizontal line and connecting the points in a same block by arcs. Crossings and nestings are then pairs of arcs that cross or nest. Let G be an abelian group, and \alpha, \beta \in G. In this talk I will look at the distribution of the statistic s_{\alpha, \beta} = \alpha * cr + \beta * ne on subtrees of the tree of all set partitions and present a result which says that the distribution of s_{\alpha, \beta} on a subtree is determined by its distribution on the first two levels.

Small-time statistical behavior of Levy processes and its application to the estimation and pricing of Levy-based financial models

Series
Mathematical Finance/Financial Engineering Seminar
Time
Friday, September 24, 2010 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 002
Speaker
J.E. Figueroa-Lopez – Purdue University
The first order small-time approximation of the marginal distribution of a L\'evy process has been known for long-time. In this talk, I present higher order expansions polynomial in time for the distributions of a L\'evy process. As a secondary objective, I illustrate the application of our expansions in the estimation of financial models with jumps as well as in the study of the small-term asymptotic behavior of the implied volatility for this class of financial models. This talk presents joint work with C. Houdr\'e and M. Forde. Associated reading (available in the web site of the speaker): (1) Small-time expansions for the transition distribution of Levy processes. J.E. Figueroa-L\'opez and C. Houdré. Stochastic Processes and their Applications 119 pp. 3862-3889, 2009. (2) Nonparametric estimation of time-changed Levy models under high-frequency data. J.E. Figueroa-L\'opez. Advances in Applied Probability vol. 41, number 4, pp. 1161-1188, 2009. (3) The small-maturity smile for exponential Levy model. J.E. Figueroa-L\'opez and M. Forde. Preprint.

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