Past Events

Ectodermal derivatives such as teeth, hair, feathers or scales share similar morphological features and spatial patterning mechanisms. From the mathematical point of view, pioneering works of Alan Turing showed that spatial-temporal self-organization...

Let E be an arbitrary subset of R^n. Given real valued functions f defined on E and g defined on R^n, the classical obstacle problem asks for a minimizer of the Dirichlet energy subject to the following two constraints: (1) F = f on E and (2) F lies...

One of the ways we understand Teichmuller space, endowed with the Teichmuller metric, is by studying Teichmuller discs. They exist in great abundance: There is a Teichmuller disc through any point and in any direction. Typically, their projection to...

Floer homology has been a central tool to study global aspects of symplectic topology, which is based on pseudoholomorphic curve techniques proposed by Gromov. In this talk, we introduce a so-called wrapped Floer homology. Roughly speaking, this is a...

Hardy and Littlewood initiated the study of the 2k-th moments of the Riemann zeta function on the critical line. In 1918 Hardy and Littlewood established an asymptotic formula for the second moment and in 1926 Ingham established an asymptotic formula...

Optimal maps in R^n to disconnected targets necessarily contain discontinuities (i.e.~tears). But how smooth are these tears? When the target components are suitably separated by hyperplanes, non-smooth versions of the implicit function theorem can...

Equivariant formality, a notion in equivariant topology introduced by Goresky-Kottwitz-Macpherson, is a desirable property of spaces with group actions. Examples of equivariantly formal spaces include compact symplectic manifolds equipped with...

The Torelli subgroups of mapping class groups are fundamental objects in low-dimensional topology, through some basic questions about their structure remain open. In this talk I will describe these groups, and how to use tools from representation...

This talk will illustrate some patterns in the homology of the configuration space F_k(M), the space of ordered k-tuples of distinct points in a manifold M. For a fixed manifold M, as k increases, we might expect the topology of these configuration...

Midpoint rule is a numerical integrator for ordinary differential equations. When used to simulate mechanical systems, it may reveal various structure-preserving features, such as symplecticity. The talk will discuss the variational origins and...