Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Introduction to the h-principle

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, February 6, 2009 - 15:00 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Mohammad Ghomi – School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech

Please Note: (Please note this course runs from 3-5 pm.)

h-Principle consists of a powerful collection of tools developed by Gromov and others to solve underdetermined partial differential equations or relations which arise in differential geometry and topology. In these talks I will describe the Holonomic approximation theorem of Eliashberg-Mishachev, and discuss some of its applications including the sphere eversion theorem of Smale. Further I will discuss the method of convex integration and its application to proving the C^1 isometric embedding theorem of Nash.

On the long-time behavior of 2-d flows

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, February 5, 2009 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Alexander Shnirelman – Department of Mathematics, Concordia University
Consider the 2-d ideal incompressible fluid moving inside a bounded domain (say 2-d torus). It is described by 2-d Euler equations which have unique global solution; thus, we have a dynamical system in the space of sufficiently regular incompressible vector fields. The global properties of this system are poorly studied, and, as much as we know, paradoxical. It turns out that there exists a global attractor (in the energy norm), i.e. a set in the phase space attracting all trajectories (in spite the fact that the system is conservative). This apparent contradiction leads to some deep questions of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.

Knots and Open Book Decompositions

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 12:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Sinem Celik Onaran – Department of Mathematics, Middle East Technical University
Due to Alexander, it is well known that every closed oriented 3-manifold has an open book decomposition. In this talk, we will define open book decompositions of 3-manifolds. We will discuss various examples and sketch the proof of Alexander's theorem. Further, we will discuss the importance of the open books in manifold theory, in particular in contact geometry.

Hamiltonian identities for Elliptic PDEs and their applications

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 15:05 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Changfeng Gui – University of Connecticut
In this talk I will present Hamiltonian identities for elliptic PDEs and systems of PDEs. I will also show some interesting applications of these identities to problems related to solutions of some nonlinear elliptic equations in the entire space or plane. In particular, I will give a rigorous proof to the Young's law in triple junction configuration for a vector-valued Allen Cahn model arising in phase transition; a necessary condition for the existence of certain saddle solutions for Allen-Cahn equation with asymmetric double well potential will be derived, and the structure of level sets of general saddle solutions will also be discussed.

Binary Black Hole Simulations - Mission Accomplished(?)

Series
CDSNS Colloquium
Time
Monday, February 2, 2009 - 16:30 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Pablo Laguna – School of Physics, Georgia Tech
I will review results from binary black hole simulations and the role that these simulations have in astrophysics and gravitational wave observations. I will then focus on the mathematical and computational aspects of the recent breakthroughs in numerical relativity that have made finding binary black hole solutions to the Einstein field equations an almost routine exercise.

Reversibility and duality of SLE

Series
Job Candidate Talk
Time
Monday, February 2, 2009 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Dapeng Zhan – Yale University
Stochastic Loewner evolution (SLE) introduced by Oded Schramm is a breakthrough in studying the scaling limits of many two-dimensional lattice models from statistical physics. In this talk, I will discuss the proofs of the reversibility conjecture and duality conjecture about SLE. The proofs of these two conjectures use the same idea, which is to use a coupling technique to lift local couplings of two SLE processes that locally commute with each other to a global coupling. And from the global coupling, we can clearly see that the two conjectures hold.

Gabor Schauder bases and the Balian-Low Theorem

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, February 2, 2009 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Chris Heil – School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
The Balian-Low Theorem is a strong form of the uncertainty principle for Gabor systems that form orthonormal or Riesz bases for L^2(R). In this talk we will discuss the Balian-Low Theorem in the setting of Schauder bases. We prove that new weak versions of the Balian-Low Theorem hold for Gabor Schauder bases, but we constructively demonstrate that several variants of the BLT can fail for Gabor Schauder bases that are not Riesz bases. We characterize a class of Gabor Schauder bases in terms of the Zak transform and product A_2 weights; the Riesz bases correspond to the special case of weights that are bounded away from zero and infinity. This is joint work with Alex Powell (Vanderbilt University).

Duality exact sequences in contact homology

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, February 2, 2009 - 13:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
John Etnyre – School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
I will discuss a "duality" among the linearized contact homology groups of a Legendrian submanifold in certain contact manifolds (in particular in Euclidean (2n+1)-space). This duality is expressed in a long exact sequence relating the linearized contact homology, linearized contact cohomology and the ordinary homology of the Legendrian submanifold. One can use this structure to ease difficult computations of linearized contact homology in high dimensions and further illuminate the proof of cases of the Arnold Conjecture for the double points of an exact Lagrangian in complex n- space.

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