Past Events

Topic: Approximation and Our Intellectual History Abstract: Philosophers and mathematicians are lovers of truth—exact truth; in many ways, this accounts for our interwoven histories. But this is a tragic love, constantly frustrated by the elusiveness...

In this talk we see how representation theory can be used in numerical methods for partial differential equations (PDEs) and how numerics can give more efficient methods for computational problems in representation theory. In particular, we will see...

I shall start with reminders on congruences and p-adic numbers, then give Hasse's contribution to the local-global principle. I shall then mention counterexamples to the "Hasse principle" and then describe various ways which have been devised to...

Join us for a the first colloquium with Professor Curtis McMullen, Fields Medalist and professor of mathematics at Harvard University. In this talk, titled "The Question Mark Function, Welding, and Complex Dynamics," Prof. McMullen will explore a...

In this talk, we start by recalling the well-known problem of multivariate approximation by polynomials of total degree, concerning finding good points for interpolation. This allowed the discovery of the Padua Points, the first set of unisolvent and...

Hilbert's metric was first introduced by Hilbert, as the name suggests, in the 19th century in order to study metrics on subsets for which straight lines are geodesics. This is related to Hilbert's 4th problem. By the work of G. Birkhoff, these...

In the rich landscape of algebraic varieties, moduli spaces stand out as some of the most enchanting varieties, capturing the imagination of algebraic geometers with their profound elegance and deep connections to other branches of mathematics...

Homology and cohomology are powerful invariants: while easy to compute, they contain rich information about spaces, the geometry of manifolds, vector bundles, and more. (Co)homology satisfies a list of axioms which are easy to generalize. The best...

Since defending my PhD in the UBC Mathematics Department in 2023, I have worked as a sessional instructor both at UBC and at Corpus Christi College, which is one of UBC’s affiliate colleges, located at the northeast corner of campus. At UBC, I taught...

This talk will first provide a (non-exhaustive) survey of explicit results on zero-free regions and zero densities of the Riemann zeta function and their relationship to error terms in the prime number theorem. This will be extended to Dirichlet L...