Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Intersection cuts are generated from a polyhedral cone and a convex set S whose interior contains no feasible integer point. We generalize these cuts by replacing the cone with a more general polyhedron C. The resulting generalized intersection cuts dominate the original ones. This leads to a new cutting plane paradigm under which one generates and stores the intersection points of the extreme rays of C with the boundary of S rather than the cuts themselves. These intersection points can then be used to generate deeper cuts in a non-recursive fashion. (This talk is based on joint work with Francois Margot.)

In this talk, results of high-resolution numerical simulations of some complex flows that are occurring in the area of hydraulic engineering will be presented. The method of large-eddy simulation is employed to study details of the flow over rough and porous channel beds, flow in an ozone contactor and the flow through idealized emergent vegetation. The main objective of the simulations is to gain insight into physical mechanisms at play. In particular, flow unsteadiness and coherent turbulence structures are important contributors to mass and momentum transfer in open channels. The performed large-eddy simulations allow revealing and quantifying these coherent structures.

We will present probability inequalities for the sums of independent, selfadjoint random matrices. The focus is made on noncommutative generalizations of the classical bounds of Azuma, Bernstein, Cherno ff, Hoeffding, among others. These inequalities imply concentration results for the empirical covariance matrices. No preliminary knowledge of probability theory will be assumed. (The talk is based on a paper by J. Tropp).

In 1956 Mark Kac published his paper about the Foundation of Kinetic Theory in which he gave a mathematical, probabilistic description of a system of N particles colliding randomly. An interesting result that was found, though not causing any surprise, was the convergence to the stable equilibrium state. The question of the rate of the L2 convergence interested Kac and he conjectured that the spectral gap governing the convergence is uniformly bounded form below as N goes to infinity. While this was proved to be true, and even computed exactly, many situations show that the time scale of the convergence for very natural cases is proportional to N, while we would hope for an exponential decay. A different approach was considered, dealing with a more natural quantity, the entropy. In recent paper some advancement were made about evaluating the rate of change, and in 2003 Villani conjectured that the corresponding 'spectral gap', called the entropy production, is of order of 1/N. In our lecture we'll review the above topics and briefly discuss recently found results showing that the conjecture is essentially true.