PIMS Network Wide Colloquium | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

In 2021, PIMS inaugurated a high-level network wide colloquium series. For this series, distinguished speakers give talks across the full PIMS network with one talk per month during the academic term. These seminars will be available online. Please see our notes on effective virtual events for tips on getting the most out of our online events. The seminars will be recorded, and the recordings will be available on mathtube.org.

The Call for Nominations for the 2025/26 Network-Wide Colloquium Series is now open! Suggestions for speakers should be sent to Joshua Zahl (jzahl@math.ubc.ca).

Past Events

Long DNA and RNA molecules encode the genetic code of viruses and living organisms. We study the changes in DNA topology mediated by essential processes such as DNA packing and transcription of DNA into RNA. These processes are highly regulated, and...

The array 3 -3 4 -4 5 -5 0 0 4 -4 -3 3 0 0 5 -5 -5 5 0 0 -3 3 -4 4 has an interesting feature: its columns are each vectors satisfying the linear relation 3x + 4y + 5z = 0...

I will discuss a result with Bonatti and Crovisier from 2009 showing that the C^1 generic diffeomorphism f of a closed manifold has trivial centralizer; i.e. fg = gf implies that g is a power of f. I’ll discuss features of the C^1 topology that...

Finding and enumerating Boolean intervals in $W(\mathfrak{S}_n)$, the weak order of symmetric group $\mathfrak{S}_n$, can feel like trying to find needles in a haystack. However, through surprising connection to the outcome map of parking functions...

When particles interact with attractive-repulsive dynamics, which can model birds flocking, space dust, or a variety of other phenomena, they tend to form a nice distribution. Understanding these distributions is an active area of applied analysis...

For centuries, mathematicians have relied on computers to perform calculations, to suggest conjectures, and as components of mathematical proofs. In the light of more modern tools such as interactive theorem provers, machine learning algorithms, and...

We will introduce the research area of complex dynamics by studying the family of (complex) quadratic polynomials, $z->z^2+c$. Historically, mathematicians first studied the dynamics of {\em real} quadratic polynomials and then moved to the complex...

We consider metric tensors on undirected weighted graphs G, which allows us to treat P(G), the set of probability vectors on G, as a length space. On defines a divergence operator div_\mu(G) for mu in P(G), in such a way that we can use control...

Learning with Errors (LWE) is a hard math problem with algebraic structure, underpinning many proposed Post-Quantum Cryptosystems (PQC). The only PQC key exchange standardized by NIST is based on module LWE, and current publicly available PQC...

Euler’s famous formula tells us that (with appropriate caveats), a map on the sphere with f countries (faces), e borders (edges), and v border-ends (vertices) will satisfy v-e+f=2. And more generally, for a map on a surface with g holes, v-e+f=2-2g...