Past Events

Let G be a graph with adjacency matrix A. A continuous quantum walk on G is determined by the complex unitary matrix U(t)=exp(itA), where i2=−1 and t is a real number. Here, G represents a quantum spin network, and its vertices and edges represent...

In what will hopefully become a department tradition, the first colloquium of the year this Friday will consist of introductions of ten new post-doctoral fellows who have joined the department in the past few months. Each PDF will give a 5-minute...

In this talk, we will investigate the acoustic transmission eigenvalue problem associated with an inhomogeneous media with a conductive boundary. These are a new class of eigenvalue problems that are not elliptic, not self-adjoint, and non-linear...

Bicategories are an important aspect of modern category theory and provide the first instance of “category theory up to coherent isomorphism” we see when hiking up Mount Higher Category Theory. In this talk I will introduce the notion of bicategories...

Many quantum search algorithms are equivalent to coined quantum walks that start from a uniform superposition of arcs and get very close to a state that "concentrates on" some marked vertex. In this talk, we consider a related problem: if we start...

Classically, Dieudonné theory offers a linear algebraic classification of finite group schemes and p-divisible groups over a perfect field of characteristic p>0. In this talk, I will discuss generalizations of this story from the perspective of p...

Counting lattice paths with unit up and right steps beginning at the origin that are somehow constrained by a boundary is an old problem. When the boundary is the line y=x the celebrated Chung-Feller theorem states the number of paths having k flaws...

We put forward two principles of decoupling, aiming to provide a new algebraic approach of reducing decoupling for new manifolds to decoupling for known manifolds. This is joint with Jianhui Li.

Several years ago, Dr Kathryn Isaac, a UBC professor and clinical surgeon contacted me with an intriguing problem. In her work on cosmetic reconstructive for post-breast-cancer-surgery patients, she encounters cases of failure that result (weeks or...

Originally distributions were introduced in PDE-theory to generalize the notion of functions. However, this analytical concept also has some purely algebraic properties, which are worth considered. In particular, they are an important example of...