Members’ Colloquium

Given a flow on a manifold, how to perturb it in order to create a periodic orbit passing through a given region? While the first results in this direction were obtained in the 1960-ies, various facets of this question remain largely open. I will...

The Markoff equation x2+y2+z2=3xyz, which arose in his spectacular thesis (1879), is ubiquitous in a tremendous variety of contexts. After reviewing some of these, we will discuss (briefly) asymptotics of integer points, and (in some detail) recent...

Let E be an elliptic curve defined over \Q.  The \Q¯-points of E form an abelian group on which the Galois group G\Q=\Gal(\Q¯/\Q) acts.  The usual Galois representation associated to E captures the action of G\Q on the points of finite order. ...

The theory of "random surfaces" has emerged in recent decades as a significant field of mathematics, lying somehow at the interface between geometry, probability, and mathematical physics. I will give a friendly (I hope) colloquium-level overview of...

Projective modules over rings are the algebraic analogs of vector bundles; more precisely, they are direct summands of free modules. Some rings have non-free projective modules. For instance, the ideals of a number ring are projective, and for some...

Humans have been thinking about polynomial equations over the integers, or over the rational numbers, for many years. Despite this, their secrets are tightly locked up and it is hard to know what to expect, even in simple looking cases. In this talk...

Noetherianity is a fundamental property of modules, rings, and topological spaces that underlies much of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. This talk concerns algebraic structures such as the infinite-dimensional polynomial ring K[x_1,x_2...

In this talk, we will discuss the behavior of the Yamabe flow on an asymptotically flat (AF) manifold. We will first show the long-time existence of the Yamabe flow starting from an AF manifold and discuss the uniform estimates on manifolds with...

Thresholds for increasing properties of random structures are a central concern in probabilistic combinatorics and related areas.  In 2006, Kahn and Kalai conjectured that for any nontrivial increasing property on a finite set, its threshold is...

The fundamental equations of fluid dynamics exhibit non-uniqueness. Is this a mathematical fluke, or do the equations fail to uniquely predict the motion of fluids? In this colloquium, we present recent mathematical and physical progress toward...