# Mathematical Conversations

Jan 15 2020

### Hypocoercivity

Speaker: George Deligiannidis
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
I will talk about an approach to proving exponential mixing for some kinetic, non-diffusive stochastic processes, that have recently become popular in computational statistics community.
Dec 18 2019

### Faster and Simpler Algorithms for Robust Statistics

Speaker: Yu Cheng
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
In this talk, we will discuss some of the recent advances in high-dimensional robust statistics. In particular, we will focus on designing faster and simpler robust algorithms for fundamental statistical and machine learning problems.
Dec 11 2019

### Cohomology Theories and Formal Groups

Speaker: Jacob Lurie
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
In the 1960's, Quillen found a remarkable relationship between a certain class of cohomology theories and the theory of formal groups. This discovery has had a profound impact on the development of stable homotopy theory. In this talk, I'll give a brief exposition of Quillen...
Dec 04 2019

### Episodic memory from first principles

Speaker: Michelangelo Naim
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
To understand human memory one needs to understand both the ability to acquire vast amounts of information and at the same time the limited ability to recall random material. We have recently proposed a model for recalling random unstructured information that gives an...
Nov 27 2019

### NO SEMINAR

Speaker: NO SEMINAR ON THIS DATE
6:00pm | Dilworth Room

Nov 20 2019

### Some challenging graph inequality

Speaker: Fan Wei
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
A main theme in extremal combinatorics is about asking when the random construction is close to optimal. A famous conjecture of Erd\H{o}s-Simonovits and Sidorenko states that if $H$ is a bipartite graph, then the random graph with edge density $p$ has in expectation...
Nov 13 2019

### Erdős distinct distances problem on the plane

Speaker: Hong Wang
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
Given $N$ distinct points on the plane, what's the minimal number, $g(N)$, of distinct distances between them? Erdős conjectured in 1946 that $g(N)\geq O(N/(log N)^{1/2})$. In 2010, Guth and Katz showed that $g(N)\geq O(N/log N)$ using the polynomial method.
Oct 30 2019

### Optimal transport and its unexpected appearances

Speaker: Maria Colombo
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
Optimal transport has been used to have new insights on a variety of mathematical questions, ranging from functional inequalities to economics. We will discuss some of the unexpected uses of optimal transport, as a simple proof of the isoperimetric inequality and a link with...
Oct 23 2019

### Khovanov homology

Speaker: Linh Truong
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
I will describe the construction and applications of Khovanov homology, a combinatorially defined invariant for knots that categorifies the Jones polynomial.
Oct 16 2019

### What is percolation?

Speaker: Stanislav Smirnov
6:00pm | Dilworth Room
Percolation is a simple model for the movement of liquid through a porous medium or the spread of a forest fire or an epidemic: the edges of some graph are declared open or closed depending on independent coin tosses, and then connected open clusters are studied. Seemingly...