Past Events

Many modern data science tasks can be expressed as optimizing a complex, random function in high dimensions. The go-to method for such problems is Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which performs remarkably well—c.f. the success of modern neural...

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...

Since Szemeredi's Theorem and Furstenberg's proof thereof using ergodic theory, dynamical methods have been used to show the existence of numerous patterns in sets of positive upper density. These tools have led to uncovering new patterns that occur...

The tensor category of vertex operator algebras arises from two dimensional conformal field theories and has many applications such as representation theory, topological quantum field theory and quantum computations. A major problem of tensor...

In this talk, we will address areas of recent work centered around the themes of fairness and foundations in machine learning as well as highlight the challenges in this area. We will discuss recent results involving linear algebraic tools for...

It is conjectured that there are infinitely many rational curves on every projective K3 surface. A large part of this conjecture was proved by Jun Li and Christian Liedtke, based on the characteristic p reduction method proposed by Bogomolov-Hassett...

The theory of matroids originated in linear algebra and graph theory, and has deep connections with many other areas, including field theory, matching theory, submodular optimization, Lie combinatorics, and total positivity. Matroids capture the...

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...

In this talk we will explore the connection between the two seemingly unrelated concepts appearing in the title. Phase transitions occur when a system undergoes an abrupt change in behaviour as a consequence of a small change in parameters. While...

We consider cyclic partitions of the complete k-uniform hypergraph on a finite set V , minus a set of s edges, s ≥ 0. An s-almost t-complementary k-hypergraph is a k-uniform hypergraph with vertex set V and edge set E for which there exists a...