Past Events

Mathematical transcendence refers to objects (usually numbers or functions) that do not satisfy any polynomial equation, that is, they are not algebraic. The numbers $\pi$ and $e$ are famous transcendental numbers, and $e^x$ and the Gamma function...

Geometric mechanics describes Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics geometrically, and information geometry formulates statistical estimation, inference, and machine learning in terms of geometry. A divergence function is an asymmetric distance...

The classical obstacle problem consists of finding the equilibrium position of an elastic membrane whose boundary is held fixed and which is constrained to lie above a given obstacle. By classical results of Caffarelli, the free boundary is smooth...

Incommensurate structures arise from stacking single layers of low-dimensional materials on top of one another with misalignment such as an in-plane twist in orientation. While these structures are of significant physical interest, they pose many...

The exciting and rapidly-growing field of topological materials has brought with it unexpected new connections between physics and pure mathematics. As the name suggests, topology has played a significant role in understanding and classifying these...

How many lines are spanned by a set of planar points?. If the points are collinear, then the answer is clearly "one". If they are not collinear, however, several different answers exist when sets are finite and "how many" is measured by cardinality...

It is well-known in quantum information theory that a positive operator valued measure (POVM) is the most general kind of quantum measurement. A quantum probability is a normalised POVM, namely a function on certain subsets of a (locally compact and...

A graph is Ramsey if its largest clique or independent set is of size logarithmic in the number of vertices. While almost all graphs are Ramsey, there is still no known explicit construction of Ramsey graphs. We discuss recent progress on finding...

Observing a sample of random variables, we wish to decide whether or not some hypothesis about the distribution of the observed sample is correct. A decision procedure for such a problem is called a statistical test of the hypothesis under...

Techniques developed for transcendental number theory have had many surprising applications in the study of purely arithmetic questions. The aim of our talk will be to discuss this phenomenon. Speaker Bio: Cameron L. Stewart is a University Professor...