Past Events

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, the number 42 was revealed to be the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. But he didn’t say what the question was! I will reveal that here. In fact it is a...

There are various iterative approaches for solving unconstrained optimization problems. Between them, the non-monotone technique is a popular approach for improving the iterative algorithms in optimization. The non-monotone technique not only can...

The theory of random graphs is one of the most developed parts of modern combinatorics. This theory was initiated by Erdos and Renyi in the early 60’s and has evolved into a deep and beautiful area of study with numerous applications. Several...

Given two disjoint sets W_1 and W_2 of points in the plane, the Optimal Discretization problem asks for the minimum size of a family of horizontal and vertical lines that separate W_1 from W_2, that is, in every region into which the lines partition...

Over the last forty years, most progress in four-dimensional topology came from gauge theory and related invariants. Khovanov homology is an invariant of knots in of a different kind: its construction is combinatorial, and connected to ideas from...

Mathematics on the Indian subcontinent has been flourishing for over two and a half millennia, and this culture of inquiry has produced insights and techniques that are central to many of our mathematical practices today, such as the base ten decimal...

This is a joint initiative between optimizers and mathematicians at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) and the University of British Columbia (UBC), Okanagan campus. 1:30-2:30: Yana Nec (TRU): Spike pattern as a window into non-injective transient...

The theory of large deviations provides with a way to compute asymptotically the probability that an interacting particle system moves from a given configuration to another one over a fixed time interval. The problem of finding the most likely...

The theory of large deviations provides with a way to compute asymptotically the probability that an interacting particle system moves from a given configuration to another one over a fixed time interval. The problem of finding the most likely...

Ginzburg–Landau theory is one of the oldest models in classical field theory for spontaneous symmetry breaking through the Higgs mechanism. Minimizers of the Ginzburg–Landau free energy, called vortices, are well-understood, especially in 2...