Past Events

Optimal Transport theory emerged more than two centuries ago as an engineering problem posed by Gaspard Monge just before the French revolution. Its rich mathematical structure was first revealed by the Russian Nobel-prize winner Kantorovich during...

The Birnbaum Lecture in Probability will be delivered by Robin Pemantle (University of Pennsylvania) in 2023. Northwest Probability Seminars are mini-conferences held at the University of Washington and organized in collaboration with the Oregon...

Variational phase-field models of fracture have been at the center of a multidisciplinary effort involving a large community of mathematicians, mechanicians, engineers, and computational scientists over the last 25 years or so. I will start with a...

In life history studies one often encounters situations where individuals in a population are eligible to enroll only if the response time does not exceed an associated censoring time, which leads to the so called left truncated lifetime data. While...

Kemeny's constant, a fundamental parameter in the theory of Markov chains, has recently received significant attention within the graph theory community. Originally defined for a discrete, finite, time-homogeneous, and irreducible Markov chain based...

Fano varieties are projective algebraic variety with “positive curvature”. Recently, using the notion of K-stability which originates in differential geometry, projective moduli spaces for Fano varieties have been constructed. In this talk I will...

Recent decades have seen a lot of progress in the "orbital circle method" attacking classical problems from dynamics, geometry, and number theory under the umbrella of "thin groups". There was always a danger that the circle method was too crude a...

Shared rides, which pool individual riders into a single vehicle, are essential for mitigating congestion and promoting more sustainable urban transportation. However, major ridesharing platforms have long struggled to maintain a healthy and...

For every positive integer n, the quotient ring Z/nZ is the natural ring whose additive group is cyclic. The "multiplicative group modulo n" is the group of invertible elements of this ring, with the multiplication operation. As it turns out, many...

A broad class of problems in extremal geometry can be characterized as follows. Fix a positive integer k and a property of k-tuples of points in R^2. The problem is then to determine how many k-tuples in an n-point set in R^2 can have the chosen...