Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Trivialities, truths and lies about cubic graphs and Painleve I

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, November 10, 2008 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Stavros GaroufalidisSchool of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
It is easy to ask for the number T(g,n) of (rooted) graphs with n edges on a surface of genus g. Bender et al gave an asymptotic expansion for fixed g and large n. The contant t_g remained missing for over 20 years, although it satisfied a complicated nonlinear recursion relation. The relation was vastly simplified last year. But a further simplification was made possible last week, thus arriving to Painleve I. I will review many trivialities and lies about this famous non-linear differential equation, from a post modern point of view.

Schatten p-class Pseudodifferential and Affine Pseudodifferential Operators

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, November 3, 2008 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Shannon BishopSchool of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
Pseudodifferential operators and affine pseudodifferential operators arise naturally in the study of wireless communications. We discuss the origins of these operators and give new conditions on the kernels and symbols of pseudodifferential and affine pseudodifferential operators which ensure the operators are trace class (and more generally, Schatten p-class).

Bilinear Forms on the Dirichlet Space

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, October 27, 2008 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Brett WickUniversity of South Carolina
The Dirichlet space is the set of analytic functions on the disc that have a square integrable derivative. In this talk we will discuss necessary and sufficient conditions in order to have a bilinear form on the Dirichlet space be bounded. This condition will be expressed in terms of a Carleson measure condition for the Dirichlet space. One can view this result as the Dirichlet space analogue of Nehari's Theorem for the classical Hardy space on the disc. This talk is based on joint work with N. Arcozzi, R. Rochberg, and E. Sawyer

Conformal dimension of self-affine sets and modulus of a system of measures

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, October 6, 2008 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Hrant HakobyanUniversity of Toronto
A mapping F between metric spaces is called quasisymmetric (QS) if for every triple of points it distorts their relative distances in a controlled fashion. This is a natural generalization of conformality from the plane to metric spaces. In recent times much work has been devoted to the classification of metric spaces up to quasisymmetries. One of the main QS invariants of a space X is the conformal dimension, i.e the infimum of the Hausdorff dimensions of all spaces QS isomorphic to X. This invariant is hard to find and there are many classical fractals such as the standard Sierpinski carpet for which conformal dimension is not known. Tyson proved that if a metric space has sufficiently many curves then there is a lower bound for the conformal dimension. We will show that if there are sufficiently many thick Cantor sets in the space then there is a lower bound as well. "Sufficiently many" here is in terms of a modulus of a system of measures due to Fuglede, which is a generalization of the classical conformal modulus of Ahlfors and Beurling. As an application we obtain a new lower bound for the conformal dimension of self affine McMullen carpets.

Horn Conjecture for finite von Neumann algebras II

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, September 29, 2008 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Wing Suet LiSchool of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
The Horn inequalities give a characterization of eigenvalues of self-adjoint n by n matrices A, B, C with A+B+C=0. The proof requires powerful tools from algebraic geometry. In this talk I will talk about our recent result of these inequalities that are indeed valid for self-adjoint operators of an arbitrary finite factors. Since in this setting there is no readily available machinery from algebraic geometry, we are forced to look for an analysts friendly proof. A (complete) matricial form of our result is known to imply an affirmative answer to the Connes' embedding problem. Geometers especially welcome!

Horn Conjecture for finite von Neumann algebras

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, September 22, 2008 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Wing Suet LiSchool of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
The Horn inequalities give a characterization of eigenvalues of self-adjoint n by n matrices A, B, C with A+B+C=0. The proof requires powerful tools from algebraic geometry. In this talk I will talk about our recent result of these inequalities that are indeed valid for self-adjoint operators of an arbitrary finite factors. Since in this setting there is no readily available machinery from algebraic geometry, we are forced to look for an analysts friendly proof. A (complete) matricial form of our result is known to imply an affirmative answer to the Connes' embedding problem. Geometers in town especially welcome!

Recent Developments in Variable Transformations for Numerical Integration

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, September 15, 2008 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Avram SidiTechnion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa
Variable transformations are used to enhance the normally poor performance of trapezoidal rule approximations of finite-range integrals I[f]=\int^1_0f(x)dx. Letting x=\psi(t), where \psi(t) is an increasing function for 0 < t < 1 and \psi(0)=0 and \psi(1)=1, the trapezoidal rule is applied to the transformed integral I[f]=\int^1_0f(\psi(t))\psi'(t)dt. By choosing \psi(t) appropriately, approximations of very high accuracy can be obtained for I[f] via this approach. In this talk, we survey the various transformations that exist in the literature. In view of recent generalizations of the classical Euler-Maclaurin expansion, we show how some of these transformations can be tuned to optimize the numerical results. If time permits, we will also discuss some recent asymptotic expansions for Gauss-Legendre integration rules in the presence of endpoint singularities and show how their performance can be optimized by tuning variable transformations. The variable transformation approach presents a very flexible device that enables one to write his/her own high-accuracy numerical integration code in a simple way without the need to look up tables of abscissas and weights for special Gaussian integration formulas.

The ubiquitous Lagrangian

Series
Analysis Seminar
Time
Monday, August 25, 2008 - 16:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Maria Clara NucciDept. of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Perugia
In any standard course of Analytical Mechanics students are indoctrinated that a Lagrangian have a profound physical meaning (kinetic energy minus potential energy) and that Lagrangians do not exist in the case of nonconservative system.  We present an old and regretfully forgotten method by Jacobi which allows to find many nonphysical Lagrangians of simple physical models (e.g., the harmonic oscillator) and also of nonconservative systems (e.g., the damped oscillator).  The same method can be applied to any equation of second-order, and extended to fourth-order equations as well as systems of second and first order. Examples from Physics, Number Theory and Biology will be provided.

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