School of Mathematics

A Hodge structure is a certain linear algebraic datum.  Importantly, the cohomology groups of any smooth projective algebraic variety come equipped with Hodge structures which encode the integrals of algebraic differential forms over topological...

The theory of rigidity for lattices in higher rank semisimple Lie groups is a powerful and exciting subject, combining methods from algebra, number theory, geometry and dynamics. One of the most celebrated results is Margulis' normal subgroup...

Around 1992, Aldous made the following bold conjecture. Let A be any set of transpositions in the symmetric group Sym(N). Then the spectral gap of the Cayley graph Cay(Sym(N),A) is identical to that of a relatively tiny N-vertex graph defined by A...

I'll give a brief introduction to o-minimality and how it can be used to prove asymptotic estimates for the number of rational points in definable sets. I'll then show how problems from various areas of mathematics can be reformulated as questions...

In this talk, I will describe our construction of the first explicit lossless vertex expanders. These are graphs where every small subset of vertices has about as many neighbors as their sparsity allows. Previously, the strongest known explicit...

The chord conjecture, due initially to Arnol'd in the case of the standard contact three-sphere, asserts the existence of a Reeb chord with boundary on every closed Legendrian submanifold of a closed contact manifold for every contact form. This...

In characteristic zero, Castelnuovo proved that every unirational surface is rational. In positive characteristic, this fails dramatically: there exist many non-rational, often even general-type, surfaces that are nevertheless unirational. In 1977...

I will describe recent work in progress on logarithmic--exponential preparation theorems in analytically generated sharply o-minimal structures. Our results imply the sharp o-minimality of ℝexp

as well as a uniform version of Wilkie’s conjecture on...

I'll focus specifically on point counting results in o-minimal structures. I'll start with the classical theorem of Pila and Wilkie and move on to improved versions that only hold in the "sharp" variant of o-minimality.

Let Γ be a countable group with a Cayley graph G. Suppose we are running an independent identical probabilistic algorithm on each vertex (or each edge) and vertices are only allowed to communicate with their neighbors. The goal of this distributed...