Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Imaging Science meets Compressed Sensing

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, September 29, 2016 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Gitta Kutyniok – Technical University of Berlin –
Modern imaging data are often composed of several geometrically distinct constituents. For instance, neurobiological images could consist of a superposition of spines (pointlike objects) and dendrites (curvelike objects) of a neuron. A neurobiologist might then seek to extract both components to analyze their structure separately for the study of Alzheimer specific characteristics. However, this task seems impossible, since there are two unknowns for every datum. Compressed sensing is a novel research area, which was introduced in 2006, and since then has already become a key concept in various areas of applied mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. It surprisingly predicts that high-dimensional signals, which allow a sparse representation by a suitable basis or, more generally, a frame, can be recovered from what was previously considered highly incomplete linear measurements, by using efficient algorithms. Utilizing the methodology of Compressed Sensing, the geometric separation problem can indeed be solved both numerically and theoretically. For the separation of point- and curvelike objects, we choose a deliberately overcomplete representation system made of wavelets (suited to pointlike structures) and shearlets (suited to curvelike structures). The decomposition principle is to minimize the $\ell_1$ norm of the representation coefficients. Our theoretical results, which are based on microlocal analysis considerations, show that at all sufficiently fine scales, nearly-perfect separation is indeed achieved. This project was done in collaboration with David Donoho (Stanford University) and Wang-Q Lim (TU Berlin).

Quantitative real algebraic geometry and its applications

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, September 15, 2016 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Saugata Basu – Perdue University
Effective bounds play a very important role in algebraic geometry with many applications. In this talk I will survey recent progress and open questions in the quantitative study ofreal varieties and semi-algebraic sets and their connections with other areas of mathematics -- in particular,connections to incidence geometry via the polynomial partitioning method. I will also discuss some results on the topological complexity of symmetric varieties which have a representation-theoretic flavor. Finally, if time permits I will sketch how some of these results extend to the category of constructible sheaves.

The Complexity of Random Functions of Many Variables II

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, September 1, 2016 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Gérard Ben Arous – Courant Institute, NYU

Please Note: Link to the Stelson Lecture announcement http://www.math.gatech.edu/news/stelson-lecture-dr-g-rard-ben-arous

This Colloquium will be Part II of the Stelson Lecture. A function of many variables, when chosen at random, is typically very complex. It has an exponentially large number of local minima or maxima, or critical points. It defines a very complex landscape, the topology of its level lines (for instance their Euler characteristic) is surprisingly complex. This complex picture is valid even in very simple cases, for random homogeneous polynomials of degree p larger than 2. This has important consequences. For instance trying to find the minimum value of such a function may thus be very difficult. The mathematical tool suited to understand this complexity is the spectral theory of large random matrices. The classification of the different types of complexity has been understood for a few decades in the statistical physics of disordered media, and in particular spin-glasses, where the random functions may define the energy landscapes. It is also relevant in many other fields, including computer science and Machine learning. I will review recent work with collaborators in mathematics (A. Auffinger, J. Cerny) , statistical physics (C. Cammarota, G. Biroli, Y. Fyodorov, B. Khoruzenko), and computer science (Y. LeCun and his team at Facebook, A. Choromanska, L. Sagun among others), as well as recent work of E. Subag and E.Subag and O.Zeitouni.

Finding hyperbolic-like behavior in non-hyperbolic spaces

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Clary theater
Speaker
Ruth Charney – Brandeis University –
In the early '90s, Gromov introduced a notion of hyperbolicity for geodesic metric spaces. The study of groups of isometries of such spaces has been an underlying theme in much of the work in geometric group theory since that time. Many geodesic metric spaces, while not hyperbolic in the sense of Gromov, nonetheless display some hyperbolic-like behavior. I will discuss a new invariant, the Morse boundary of a space, which captures this behavior. (Joint work with Harold Sultan and Matt Cordes.)

The slicing problems for sections of proportional dimensions

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, April 14, 2016 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Alexander Koldobskiy – University of Missouri, Columbia –
We consider the following problem. Does there exist an absolute constant C such that for every natural number n, every integer 1 \leq k \leq n, every origin-symmetric convex body L in R^n, and every measure \mu with non-negative even continuous density in R^n, \mu(L) \leq C^k \max_{H \in Gr_{n-k}} \mu(L \cap H}/|L|^{k/n}, where Gr_{n-k} is the Grassmannian of (n-k)-dimensional subspaces of R^n, and |L| stands for volume? This question is an extension to arbitrary measures (in place of volume) and to sections of arbitrary codimension k of the hyperplace conjecture of Bourgain, a major open problem in convex geometry. We show that the above inequality holds for arbitrary origin-symmetric convex bodies, all k and all \mu with C \sim \sqrt{n}, and with an absolute constant C for some special class of bodies, including unconditional bodies, unit balls of subspaces of L_p, and others. We also prove that for every \lambda \in (0,1) there exists a constant C = C(\lambda) so that the above inequality holds for every natural number, every origin-symmetric convex body L in R^n, every measure \mu with continuous density and the codimension of sections k \geq \lambda n. The latter result is new even in the case of volume. The proofs are based on a stability result for generalized intersections bodies and on estimates of the outer volume ratio distance from an arbitrary convex body to the classes of generalized intersection bodies.

On two dimensional gravity water waves with angled crests

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, March 17, 2016 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Sijue Wu – University of Michigan –
In this talk, I will survey the recent understandings on the motion of water waves obtained via rigorous mathematical tools, this includes the evolution of smooth initial data and some typical singular behaviors. In particular, I will present our recently results on gravity water waves with angled crests.

Almost orthogonality in Fourier analysis: From singular integrals, to function spaces, to the structural coloration of biological tissues

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, March 10, 2016 - 16:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Rodolfo Torres – University of Kansas
Decomposition techniques such as atomic, molecular, wavelet and wave-packet expansions provide a multi-scale refinement of Fourier analysis and exploit a rather simple concept: “waves with very different frequencies are almost invisible to each other”. Starting with the classical Calderon-Zygmund and Littlewood-Paley decompositions, many of these useful techniques have been developed around the study of singular integral operators. By breaking an operator or splitting the functions on which it acts into non-interacting almost orthogonal pieces, these tools capture subtle cancelations and quantify properties of an operator in terms of norm estimates in function spaces. This type of analysis has been used to study linear operators with tremendous success. More recently, similar decomposition techniques have been pushed to the analysis of new multilinear operators that arise in the study of (para) product-like operations, commutators, null-forms and other nonlinear functional expressions. In this talk we will present some of our contributions in the study of multilinear singular integrals, function spaces, and the analysis of nanostructure in biological tissues, not all immediately connected topics, yet all centered on some notion of almost orthogonality.

Closed geodesics on compact simply connected Finsler manifolds

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Prof. Dr. Yiming Long – Nankai University
The closed geodesic problem is a classical topic of dynamical systems, differential geometry and variational analysis, which can be chased back at least to Poincar\'e. A famous conjecture claims the existence of infinitely many distinct closed geodesics on every compact Riemaniann manifold. But so far this is only proved for the 2-dimentional case. On the other hand, Riemannian metrics are quadratic reversible Finsler metrics, and the existence of at least one closed geodesic on every compact Finsler manifold is well-known because of the famous work of Lyusternik and Fet in 1951. In 1973 A. Katok constructed a family of remarkable Finsler metrics on every sphere $S^d$ which possesses precisely $2[(d+1)/2]$ distinct closed geodesics. In 2004, V. Bangert and the author proved the existence of at least $2$ distinct closed geodesics for every Finsler metric on $S^2$, and this multiplicity estimate on $S^2$ is sharp by Katok's example. Since this work, many new results on the multiplicity and stability of closed geodesics have been established. In this lecture, I shall give a survey on the study of closed geodesics on compact Finsler manifolds, including a brief history and results obtained in the last 10 years. Then I shall try to explain the most recent results we obtained for the multiplicity and stability of closed geodesics on compact simply connected Finsler manifolds, sketch the ideas of their proofs, and then propose some further open problems in this field.

Unitary representations of reductive Lie groups

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, March 3, 2016 - 16:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Peter Trapa – University of Utah
Unitary representations of Lie groups appear in many guises in mathematics: in harmonic analysis (as generalizations of classical Fourier analysis); in number theory (as spaces of modular and automorphic forms); in quantum mechanics (as "quantizations" of classical mechanical systems); and in many other places. They have been the subject of intense study for decades, but their classification has only recently emerged. Perhaps surprisingly, the classification has inspired connections with interesting geometric objects (equivariant mixed Hodge modules on flag varieties). These connections have made it possible to extend the classification scheme to other related settings. The purpose of this talk is to explain a little bit about the history and motivation behind the study of unitary representations and offer a few hints about the algebraic and geometric ideas which enter into their study. This is based on joint work with Adams, van Leeuwen, and Vogan.

Nuclear physics, random matrices and zeros of L-functions

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, March 3, 2016 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Daniel Fiorilli – University of Ottawa –
While the fields named in the title seem unrelated, there is a strong link between them. This amazing connection came to life during a meeting between Freeman Dyson and Hugh Montgomery at the Institute for Advanced Study. Random matrices are now known to predict many number theoretical statistics, such as moments, low-lying zeros and correlations between zeros. The goal of this talk is to discuss this connection, focusing on number theory. We will cover both basic facts about the zeta functions and recent developments in this active area of research.

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