Past Events

Although integers are ubiquitous in quantum physics, they have different mathematical origins. In this colloquium, I will give a glimpse of how integers arise as either topological invariants or as analytic indices, as is the case in the so-called...

I will present nonlinear dynamics for distributed decision-making that derive from principles of symmetry and bifurcation. Inspired by studies of animal groups, including house-hunting honeybees and schooling fish, the nonlinear dynamics describe a...

Mathematical models for population dynamics have a long history in biomathematics. They are tools to explore the effects of birth and death, species interaction, landscape quality and spatial movement on the persistence, spread and spatial...

The Heegaard Floer theory of a 4-ended tangle takes the form ofan immersed curve (with possibly non-trivial local system) on theboundary of the tangle minus the tangle ends. The Heegaard Floerhomology of a link can be computed as the Lagrangian...

Moving boundary problems are found in many contexts including coastlines and the seabed on the large scale to atherosclerosis and blood clotting on the micro scale. The coupling between the fluid flow and evolving solid bodies is an important...

In the past twenty years there has been a flurry of activity in the study of mean values of L-functions. This was precipitated by groundbreaking work of Keating and Snaith in which they modelled these mean values by random matrix theory. In this talk...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a liver disorder that can result in cirrhosis, liver failure and hepatocellular carcinoma. HBV infection remains a major global health problem, as it affects more 350 million people chronically and kills roughly...

Church-Ellenberg-Farb introduced the theory of FI-modules to explain the phenomenon of representation stability of the cohomology of configuration spaces. I will explain the basics of how this story goes, and then explain how to extend their analysis...

We describe a penalty function for constrained nonlinear programs, originally proposed by Fletcher (1970). This penalty function is smooth and exact, so that minimizers of the original problem are minimizers of the penalty function for a sufficiently...

We will discuss several results related to transversals in Latin squares (think "Sudoku") and other Latin square-like objects. These results centre around showing the existence of, the number of, or the structure of transversals in different cases...