Previous Conferences & Workshops

Some people think that the brain is something like a (conscious) computer. But if a brain can compute, why can't a rock, or a river stream? This basic question has been considered by philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians.

It is not entirely...

Abstract: I will share with you a connection between multimatroids and moduli spaces of rational curves with cyclic action. Multimatroids are generalizations of matroids and delta-matroids that naturally arise from topological graph theory. The main...

Abstract: I will introduce the external activity complex of an ordered pair of matroids on the same ground set. This is the combinatorial analogue of the Schubert variety of an ordered pair of linear subspaces of a fixed space, which is also new...

Abstract: The groundbreaking results by Huh (further extended in joint work with Adiprasito and Katz) allowed to associate to a matroid a class in the Chow ring of the permutohedral variety. The technique turned out to be especially powerful, as...

Given a compact hyperbolic surface together with a suitable choice of orthonormal basis of Laplace eigenforms, one can consider two natural spectral invariants: 1) the Laplace spectrum $\Lambda$, and 2) the 3-tensor $C_{ijk}$ representing pointwise...

Abstract: We study the tropicalization of principal minors of positive definite matrices over a real valued field. This tropicalization forms a subset of M-concave functions on the discrete n-dimensional cube. We show that it coincides with a linear...

Abstract: We characterize the topology of the space of Lorentzian polynomials with a given support in terms of the local Dressian. We prove that this space can be compactified to a closed Euclidean ball whose dimension is the rank of the Tutte group...

I will discuss the Hanna Neumann conjecture of the 1950's and some tools in graph theory that I used to solve it.  The tools include sheaf theory on graphs, Galois theory for graphs, and the preservation of "local properties" under base change (for...

Abstract: This talk asks which tropicalisations of subvarieties of the torus know the cohomology of the original variety. A motivating example are linear embeddings of complements of hyperplane arrangements. 

We can prove that the tropicalisation...