Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Motivated by Smale's work on smooth dynamical systems, David Ruelle introduced the notion of Smale spaces. These are topological dynamical systems which are hyperbolic in the sense of having local coordinates of contracting and expending directions. These include hyperbolic automorphisms of tori, but typically, the spaces involved have a fractal nature. An important subclass are the shifts of finite type which are symbolic systems described by combinatorial data. These are also precisely the Smale spaces which are totally disconnected. Rufus Bowen showed that every Smale space is the image of shift of finite type under a finite-to-one factor map. In the 1970's, Wolfgang Krieger introduced a beautiful invariant for shifts of finite type. The aim of this talk is to show how a refined version of Bowen's theorem may be used to extend Krieger's invariant to all (irreducible) Smale spaces. The talk will assume no prior knowledge of these topics - we begin with a discussion of Smale spaces and shifts of finite type and then move on to Krieger's invariant and its extension.

In this talk, I will present an brief introdution to use partial differential equation (PDE) and variational techniques (including techniques developed in computational fluid dynamics (CFD)) into wavelet transforms and Applications in Image Processing. Two different approaches are used as examples. One is PDE and variational frameworks for image reconstruction. The other one is an adaptive ENO wavelet transform designed by using ideas from Essentially Non-Oscillatory (ENO) schemes for numerical shock capturing.

Tolerance graphs were introduced in 1982 by Golumbic and Monma as a generalization of the class of interval graphs. A graph G= (V, E) is an interval graph if each vertex v \in V can be assigned a real interval I_v so that xy \in E(G) iff I_x \cap I_y \neq \emptyset. Interval graphs are important both because they arise in a variety of applications and also because some well-known recognition problems that are NP-complete for general graphs can be solved in polynomial time when restricted to the class of interval graphs. In certain applications it can be useful to allow a representation of a graph using real intervals in which there can be some overlap between the intervals assigned to non-adjacent vertices. This motivates the following definition: a graph G= (V, E) is a tolerance graph if each vertex v \in V can be assigned a real interval I_v and a positive tolerance t_v \in {\bf R} so that xy \in E(G) iff |I_x \cap I_y| \ge \min\{t_x,t_y\}. These topics can also be studied from the perspective of ordered sets, giving rise to the classes of Interval Orders and Tolerance Orders. In this talk we give an overview of work done in tolerance graphs and orders . We use hierarchy diagrams and geometric arguments as unifying themes.

The Cohen-Gallavotti Fluctuation theorem is a result describing the behaviour of simple hyperbolic dynamical systems. It was introduced to illustrate, in a somewhat simpler context, anomalies in the second law of thermodynamics. I will describe the mathematical formulation of this Fluctuation Theorem, and some variations on it.