Past Events
Scientific, Seminar
Probability Seminar: Group Field Theory
October 21, 2009
University of British Columbia
Group field theory is the higher-dimensional generalization of random matrix models. As it has built-in scales and automatically sums over metrics and discretizations, it provides a combinatoric origin for space time. Its graphs facilitate a new...
Scientific, Seminar
SCAIM Seminar: Efficient High-Order Hybrid Elements for the Wave Equations
October 20, 2009
University of British Columbia
Gauss-Lobatto spectral elements, based on hexahedral meshes, provide a very efficient way to solve transient wave equations in terms of storage and of computational time. Unfortunately, it is very difficult and almost impossible in some cases to...
Scientific, Seminar
PIMS/WMAX Postdoctoral Colloquium: Parabolic systems with rough initial data
October 8, 2009
University of British Columbia
Abstract: Studying non-smooth geometric objects is a very important and modern research topic in differential geometry and geometric analysis. In particular it is interesting to know to which extent these objects can be approximated by smooth ones.In...
Scientific, Seminar
Topology Seminar: Survey of profinite homotopy theory
October 7, 2009
University of British Columbia
Scientific, Seminar
DG-MP-PDE Seminar: Volume Growth, Brownian motion, and Conservation of the heat kernel on a Riemannian manifold
October 6, 2009
University of British Columbia
Abstract: The minimal heat kernel on a Riemannian manifold is conservative if it integrates to 1. If this is the case, the manifold is said to be stochastically complete. Since the heat kernel is the transition density function of Brownian motion, a...
Scientific, Seminar
SCAIM Seminar: Reconstruction Techniques for Inverse Problems in Microscopy and Tomography
October 6, 2009
University of British Columbia
Abstract: We address the task of reconstructing images corrupted by Poisson noise, which is important in various applications, such as fluorescence microscopy, positronemission- tomography (PET) or astronomical imaging. We focus on reconstruction...
Scientific, Seminar
Discrete Math Seminar: Skew Schur Functions of Sums of Fat Staircases
October 6, 2009
University of British Columbia
We introduce the notion of a fat staircase and define when a skew diagram D is a sum of fat staircases. We give a collection of Schur-positivity results that may be obtained from each sum of fat staircases. Further, we determine conditions on when a...
Scientific, Seminar
Math Biology Seminar: Models and manipulations: Min oscillations inside an E. coli bacterium
October 6, 2009
University of British Columbia
Subcellular oscillations of Min proteins within individual cells of E. coli serve to localize division to midcell. While significant progress has been made to understand the Min oscillation both experimentally and in modeling, I will present three...
Scientific, Seminar
A Graph of Matrices
October 2, 2009
University of Regina
Free probability is a variation of probability theory for matrix valued random variables. It has many aspects: combinatorial, analytic, theoretical, and applied. I will discuss a problem on a graph of matrices arising from a random matrix problem in...
Scientific, Seminar
Number Theory Seminar: On the Báez-Duarte criterion for the Riemann hypothesis
October 1, 2009
University of British Columbia
Define $e_{n}(t)=\{t/n\}$. Let $d_N$ denote the distance in $L^2(0,\infty ; t^{-2}dt)$ between the indicator function of $[1,\infty[$ and the vector space generated by $e_1, \dots, e_N$. A theorem of B\'aez-Duarte (2003) states that the Riemann...