Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk, I will discuss chip-firing games on graphs, and the related Jacobian groups. Additionally, I will describe elliptic curves over finite fields, and how such objects also have group structures. For a family of graphs obtained by deforming the sequence of wheel graphs, the cardinalities of the Jacobian groups satisfy a nice reciprocal relationship with the orders of elliptic curves as we consider field extensions. I will finish by discussing other surprising ways that these group structures are analogous. Some of this research was completed as part of my dissertation work at the University of California, San Diego under Adriano Garsia's guidance.

In this talk, I will focus on some interesting examples in the conditional expectation and martingale, for example, gambling system "Martingale", Polya's urn scheme, Galton-Watson process, Wright-Fisher model of population genetics. I will skip the theorems and properties. Definitions to support the examples will be introduced. The talk will not assume a lot of probability, just some basic measure theory.

We describe recent progress in the study of the binary deletion channel and related channels with synchronization errors, including a clear description of many open problems in this area. As an example, while the capacity of the binary symmetric error channel and the binary erasure channel have been known since Shannon, we still do not have a closed-form description of the capacity of the binary deletion channel. We highlight a recent result that shows that the capacity is at least (1-p)/9 when each bit is deleted independently with fixed probability p.

Living systems are subject to constant evolution through the two processes of mutations and selection, a principle discovered by Darwin. In a very simple, general, and idealized description, their environment can be considered as a nutrient shared by all the population. This allows certain individuals, characterized by a 'phenotypical trait', to expand faster because they are better adapted to the environment. This leads to select the 'best fitted trait' in the population (singular point of the system). On the other hand, the new-born population undergoes small variance on the trait under the effect of genetic mutations. In these circumstances, is it possible to describe the dynamical evolution of the current trait? We will give a mathematical model of such dynamics, based on parabolic equations, and show that an asymptotic method allows us to formalize precisely the concepts of monomorphic or polymorphic population. Then, we can describe the evolution of the 'best fitted trait' and eventually compute various forms of branching points, which represent the cohabitation of two different populations. The concepts are based on the asymptotic analysis of the above mentioned parabolic equations, one appropriately rescaled. This leads to concentrations of the solutions and the difficulty is to evaluate the weight and position of the moving Dirac masses that describe the population. We will show that a new type of Hamilton-Jacobi equation, with constraints, naturally describes this asymptotic. Some additional theoretical questions as uniqueness for the limiting H.-J. equation will also be addressed. This work is based on collaborations with O. Diekmann, P.-E. Jabin, S. Mischler, S. Cuadrado, J. Carrillo, S. Genieys, M. Gauduchon and G. Barles.