Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

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.

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.

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).

Part of Spielman and Teng's smoothed analysis of the Simplex algorithm relied on showing that most minors of a typical random rectangular matrix are well conditioned (do not have any singular values too close to zero). Motivated by this, Vershynin asked the question as to whether it was typically true that ALL minors of a random rectangular matrix are well conditioned. Here I will explain why that the answer to this question is in fact no: Even an n by 2n matrix will typically have n by n minors which have singular values exponentially close to zero.