Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We study generalized traveling front solutions of reaction-diffusion equations modeling flame propagation in combustible media. Although the case of periodic media has been studied extensively, until very recently little has been known for general disordered media. In this talk we will address questions of existence, uniqueness, and stability of traveling fronts in this framework.

I will discuss a couple of applications of transverse knot theory to the classification of contact structures and braid theory. In particular I will make the statement "transverse knots classify contact structures" precise and then prove it (if we have time). I will also discuss how progress on two of Orevkov's questions concerning quasi-positive knots that have implications for Hilbert's 16th problem.

Comparison geometry studies Riemannian manifolds with a given curvature bound.  This minicourse is an introduction to volume comparison (as developed by Bishop and Gromov), which is fundamental in understanding manifolds with a lower bound on Ricci curvature. Prerequisites are very modest: we only need basics of Riemannian geometry, and fluency with fundamental groups and metric spaces. In the first (2 hour) lecture I shall explain what volume comparison is and derive several applications.

If viewed realistically, models under consideration are always false. A consequence of model falseness is that for every data generating mechanism, there exists a sample size at which the model failure will become obvious. There are occasions when one will still want to use a false model, provided that it gives a parsimonious and powerful description of the generating mechanism. We introduced a model credibility index, from the point of view that the model is false. The model credibility index is defined as the maximum sample size at which samples from the model and those from the true data generating mechanism are nearly indistinguishable. Estimating the model credibility index is under the framework of subsampling, where a large data set is treated as our population, subsamples are generated from the population and compared with the model using various sample sizes. Exploring the asymptotic properties of the model credibility index is associated with the problem of estimating variance of U statistics. An unbiased estimator and a simple fix-up are proposed to estimate the U statistic variance.