Past Events

An Azumaya algebra is something that is "locally" isomorphic to a matrix algebra. By varying the sense of "locally", we arrive at different incarnations of the concept. The motivating example is that of central simple algebras over a field. In this...

The Pythagorean theorem, dating back to before 500 BC, gives a formula for computing the Euclidean distance between two points. It is simply astounding that a concept so simple and classical has continued to fascinate mathematicians over the ages...

Full waveform inversion (FWI) is a novel seismic wave equation-based data-driven approach characterized by exploiting full waveform information from all types of seismic data. It can image the subsurface with high resolution, up to half the...

In this talk, I will discuss certain extremal configurations in Q-polynomial distance-regular graphs (or P- and Q-polynomial association schemes), which we call descendents. The descendents of a hypercube are precisely its faces. I will show how they...

The rational points of an abelian variety form a finitely generated group and computing the rank of this group is a hard and central problem in arithmetic geometry. One method, which follows the original proof of Mordell and Weil of the finiteness of...

We study a single-period optimal transport problem with a cost function given by a general bilinear form and a backward martingale constraint. The role of Kantorovich potentials is played by Fitzpatrick functions. The dual problem is a pseudo...

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the standard optimization method for training machine learning (ML) models. SGD requires a step-size that depends on unknown problem-dependent quantities, and the choice of this step-size heavily influences the...

Peter Borewein empirically discovered quite a number of mysteries involving sign patterns of coefficients of polynomials of the form $f_{p,s,n}(q):=\prod_{j=0}^{n} \prod_{k=1}^{p-1} (1-q^{pj+k})^{s}$ ($p$ a prime and $s,n \in \mathbb{N}$). In the...

Structural Ramsey theory generalizes classical Ramsey theory by considering classes of finite sets with additional structure (such as finite groups or finite partial orders) and colourings of their substructures. When the class satisfies an...