Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Cohomology groups of moduli spaces of curves are fruitfully studied from several mathematical perspectives, including geometric group theory, stably homotopy theory, and quantum algebra.  Algebraic geometry endows these cohomology groups with additional structures (Hodge structures and Galois representations), and the Langlands program makes striking predictions about which such structures can appear.  In this talk, I will present recent results inspired by, and in some cases surpassing, such predictions.  These include the vanishing of odd cohomology on moduli spaces of stable curves in degrees less than 11, generators and relations for H^11, and new constructions of unstable cohomology on M_g.  

Based on joint work with Jonas Bergström and Carel Faber; with Sam Canning and Hannah Larson; with Melody Chan and Søren Galatius; and with Thomas Willwacher. 

I will highlight recent interplay between problems in extremal combinatorics and real algebraic geometry. This sheds a new light on undecidability of graph homomorphism density inequalities in extremal combinatorics, trace inequalities in linear algebra, and symmetric polynomial inequalities in real algebraic geometry. All of the necessary notions will be introduced in the talk. Joint work with Jose Acevedo, Sebastian Debus and Cordian Riener.

Networks of coupled oscillators are studied in biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. The Kuramoto model is a simple dynamical system that models the nonlinear interaction among coupled oscillators. It has received widespread attention since it is simple enough to be analyzed rigorously yet complex enough to exhibit interesting emergent behaviors.

One such emergent behavior is the spontaneous synchronization of oscillators into special configurations. In the past decades, rigorous analysis of such synchronization configurations has been the focus of intensive studies.

In this talk, we explore the new insight to this problem provided by an algebraic and tropical approach.

 I will give an introduction to Oliver Lorscheid’s theory of ordered blueprints – one of the more successful approaches to “the field of one element” – and sketch its relationship to Tits models for algebraic groups and moduli spaces of matroids. The basic idea for these applications is quite simple: given a scheme over Z defined by equations with coefficients in {0,1,-1}, there is a corresponding “blue model” whose K-points (where K is the Krasner hyperfield) sometimes correspond to interesting combinatorial structures. For example, taking closed K-points of a suitable blue model for a split reductive group scheme G over Z gives the Weyl group of G, and taking K-points of a suitable blue model for the Grassmannian G(r,n) gives the set of matroids of rank r on {1,...,n}.