Past Events

This lecture will explain the Turing Test as well as Turing's more general views concerning the prospects for artificial intelligence and examine both the criticisms of the test and Turing's rebuttals.

Feasibility problems, i.e., finding a solution satisfying certain constraints, are common in mathematics and the natural sciences. If the constraints have simple projectors (nearest point mappings), then one popular approach to these problems is to...

If A is the adjacency matrix of a graph X, then the matrix exponentialU(t) = exp(itA) determines what physicists term a continuous quantum walk. They ask questions such as: for which graphs are the vertices a and b and a t such that jU(t)a;bj = 1...

Submodular functions, a discrete analogue of convex functions, have played a fundamental role in combinatorial optimization since the 1970s. In the last decade, there has been renewed interest in submodular functions due to their interpretation as...

Recent developments in graphical models and the logic of causation have had a drastic effect on the way scientists now treat problems involving cause-effect relationships. Paradoxes and controversies have been resolved, slippery concepts have been...

Bio: Henri Darmon specializes in number theory, working on Hilbert's 12th problem and its relation with the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and currently, a James McGill Professor of Mathematics at...

We will show how elementary product decompositions of measures can detect directionality in sets, and show how this can be used to describe non-differentiability sets of Lipschitz functions on R^n, and to understand the phenomena that occur because...

Cancer comes about by a sequence of mutations that change the cells' fitness and create advantageous phenotypes. These phenotypes displace other cells and spread, thus winning the evolutionary competition. It is possible that in order to create those...

Abstract: Inverse eigenvalue problems have received considerable attention, and arise frequently in engineering applications. Many inverse eigenvalue problems reduce to the construction of a matrix with prescribed spectral data. One interesting...

In the local Langlands program the (smooth) representation theoryof p-adic reductive groups G in characteristic zero plays a key role. For any compact open subgroup K of G there is a so called Hecke algebra H(G,K). The representation theory of G is...