Past Events

The generalized null space decomposition (GNSD), better known as the staircase decomposition, is a unitary reduction of a general matrix A of order n to a block upper triangular form that reveals the structure of the Jordan blocks of A corresponding...

It is known that if the negative Pell equation X2−DY2=−1 is solvable (in integers), and if (x,y) is its solution with smallest positive x and y, then all of its solutions (xn,yn) are given by the formula xn + yn√D = ±(x + y√D) 2n+1 for n∈Z...

Nonparametric density estimation is a challenging statistical problem -- in general the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) does not even exist! Introducing shape constraints allows a path forward. In this talk I will discuss non-parametric density...

Human milk production is controlled by a variety of internal and external factors, including hormones, neurons, suckling stimulus and milk removal. One method for increasing milk production colloquially suggested to mothers who want to produce more...

The exclusion process is one of the most basic and best studied processes in the literature on interacting particle systems, with connections to card shuffling and statistical mechanics. It has been one of the major examples driving the study of...

In this talk we introduce an unusual eigenvalue problem that arises in fluid-structure interaction problems: the Jones eigenmode problem, described first by D.S. Jones in the eighties.The Jones eigenvalue problem was stated in the context of fluid...

Please bring your favourite (math) problems. Anyone with a problem to share will be given about 5 minutes to present it. We will also choose most of the speakers for the rest of the semester.

Inverse problems (the problem of inferring an unknown parameter from indirect and noisy measurements) are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The Bayesian approach to inverse problems provides a probabilistic framework in which prior knowledge...

Given a principally polarized abelian variety $A$ over a number field (or a function field), one can naturally extract two real numbers that capture the ``complexity'' of $A$: one is the Faltings height and the other is the N\'eron-Tate height (of a...

Graphical semi-supervised learning is the problem of labelling the verticess of a graph given the labels of a a few vertices along with geometric information about the graph. Such problems have attracted a lot of attention in machine learning for...