Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A line arrangement is a collection of lines in the projective plane.  The intersection lattice of the line arrangement is the set of all lines and their intersections, ordered with respect to reverse inclusion.  A line arrangement is called free if the Jacobian ideal of the line arrangement is saturated.  The underlying motivation for this talk is a conjecture of Terao which says that whether a line arrangement is free can be detected from its intersection lattice.  This raises a question - in what ways does the saturation of the Jacobian ideal depend on the geometry of the lines and not just the intersection lattice?  A main objective of the talk is to introduce planar rigidity theory and show that 'infinitesimal rigidity' is a property of line arrangements which is not detected by the intersection lattice, but contributes in a very precise way to the saturation of the Jacobian ideal.  This connection builds a theory around a well-known example of Ziegler.  This is joint work with Jessica Sidman (Mt. Holyoke College) and Will Traves (Naval Academy).

We will continue our discussion of the key ingredients of a multi-scale analysis, namely resolvent decay and the Wegner type estimate. After briefly discussing how the Wegner estimate is obtained in the regime of regular noise, we will discuss the strategy used in Bourgain-Kenig (2005) and Ding-Smart (2018) to obtain analogues thereof using some form of unique continuation principle.

From here, we'll examine the quantitative unique continuation principle used by Bourgain-Kenig, and the lack of any even qualitative analogue on the two-dimensional lattice. From here, we'll discuss the quantitative probabilistic unique continuation result used in Ding-Smart.

 I will discuss the soliton resolution and asymptotic stability problems for the sine-Gordon equation. It is known that the obstruction to the asymptotic stability for the sine-Gordon equation in the energy space is the existence of small breathers which is also closely related to the emergence of wobbling kinks. Our stability analysis gives a criterion for the weight which is sharp up to the endpoint so that the asymptotic stability holds. This is joint work with Jiaqi Liu and Bingying Lu.

When do commuting homeomorphisms of S^2 have a common fixed point? Christian Bonatti gave the first sufficient condition: Commuting diffeomorphisms sufficiently close to the identity in Diff^+(S^2) always admit a common fixed point. In this talk we present a result of Michael Handel that extends Bonatti's condition to a much larger class of commuting homeomorphisms. If time permits, we survey results for higher genus surfaces due to Michael Handel and Morris Hirsch, and connections to certain compact foliated 4-manifolds.