Previous Conferences & Workshops

Oct
27
2015

Geometric Structures on 3-manifolds

CAT(0) cube complexes and virtually special groups
Daniel Groves
2:00pm|S-101

Sageev associated to a codimension 1 subgroup $H$ of a group $G$ a cube complex on which $G$ acts by isometries, and proved this cube complex is always CAT(0). Haglund and Wise developed a theory of special cube complexes, whose fundamental groups...

Oct
27
2015

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar II

Algorithmic proof of the Lovasz Local Lemma via resampling oracles
10:30am|S-101

For a collection of events on a probability space with specified dependencies, the Lovasz Local Lemma ("LLL") gives a sufficient condition for the existence of a point avoiding all the events. Following Moser's discovery of an efficient algorithm...

Oct
26
2015

Members’ Seminar

Quantum Ergodicity for the uninitiated
2:00pm|S-101

A key result in spectral theory linking classical and quantum mechanics is the Quantum Ergodicity theorem, which states that in a system in which the classical is ergodic, almost all of the Laplace eigenfunctions become uniformly distributed in...

Oct
26
2015

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar I

Random words, longest increasing subsequences, and quantum PCA
John Wright
11:15am|S-101

Suppose you have access to iid samples from an unknown probability distribution $p = (p_1, \ldots, p_d)$ on $[d]$, and you want to learn or test something about it. For example, if one wants to estimate $p$ itself, then the empirical distribution...

Oct
23
2015

Joint IAS/Princeton University Symplectic Geometry Seminar

Dehn twists exact sequences through Lagrangian cobordism
Weiwei Wu
2:00pm|S-101

In this talk we first introduce a new "singularity-free" approach to the proof of Seidel's long exact sequence, including the fixed-point version. This conveniently generalizes to Dehn twists along Lagrangian submanifolds which are rank one...

Oct
23
2015

Minerva Mini-Course

An overview of Benjamini-Schramm convergence in group theory and dynamics
Lewis Bowen
1:30pm|Fine 110, Princeton University

Finite models of infinite groups/actions/manifolds are useful for studying spectral and $L^2$-invariants, constructing random processes and have recently been used to introduce new invariants of group actions useful for proving nonembedding and...

Oct
22
2015

Joint IAS/Princeton University Number Theory Seminar

Unlikely intersections for two-parameter families of polynomials
Tom Tucker
4:30pm|Fine 214, Princeton University

Inspired by work of Masser and Zannier for torsion specializations of points on the Legendre elliptic curve, Baker and DeMarco proved that if $v$, $w$ are two points in $C$, then there are at most finitely many $t$ in $C$ such that $v$ and $w$ are...

Oct
20
2015

Geometric Structures on 3-manifolds

Non-orientable knot genus and the Jones polynomial
4:00pm|S-101

The non-orientable genus (a.k.a crosscap number) of a knot is the smallest genus over all non-orientable surfaces spanned by the knot. In this talk, I’ll describe joint work with Christine Lee, in which we obtain two-sided linear bound of the...