Past Events

PIMS is excited to host the 2022 CRM-Fields-PIMS prize winner for an afternoon lecture. The 2021 winner, Andrew Granville, will be presenting at the University of British Columbia. The lecture will be online, allowing members from the PIMS community...

There are two rotary motors in biology, ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellar motor. Both are driven by transmembrane ionic currents. We consider an idealized model of such a motor, essentially an electrostatic turbine. The model has a rotor and a...

A Glass network is a system of first order ODEs with discontinuous right hand side coming from step function terms. The "ON/OFF" switching dynamics from the step functions makes Glass networks effective at modelling switching behaviour typical of...

An highly active research area is concerned with finding conditions on sparse sets that ensure the existence of many geometric patterns. I will present some results in this direction connecting Newhouse thickness and its generalizations to higher...

Hyperbolic transport-reaction systems are often used to model the finite speed movement and interaction of particles, bacteria or animals. The most known example is the Goldstein-Kac model (1974) and its connection to the telegraph equation. To the...

A power series f(x1,…,xm)∈C[[x1,…,xm]] is said to be D-finite if all the partial derivatives of f span a finite dimensional vector space over the field C(x1,…,xm). For the univariate series f(x)=∑anxn, this is equivalent to the condition that the...

Abstract: Consider Z^2, and assign a random length of 1 or 2 to each edge based on independent fair coin tosses. The resulting random geometry, first passage percloation, is conjectured to have a scaling limit. Most random plane geometric models...

We first review some known results about resistance matrix of an undirected graph. We then define resistance distance in a strongly connected, directed graph. When the graph is balanced, that is, the indegree and the outdegree of any vertex are the...

Kinetic equations describe the nonequilibrium dynamics of a complex system using a probability density function. Despite of their important role in multiscale modeling to bridge microscopic and macroscopic scales, numerically solving kinetic...

Clemens–Griffiths introduced the classical intermediate Jacobian obstruction to rationality for complex threefolds, and used it to show irrationality of the cubic threefold. Recently, over non-closed fields, Hassett–Tschinkel and Benoist–Wittenberg...