The advent of wide-field synoptic imaging has re-invigorated the
venerable field of time domain astronomy. Our framework of optical
transients no longer has a wide six-magnitude luminosity "gap"
between the brightest novae and faintest supernovae...
A classic problem posed by long gamma ray bursts (GRB) is that
the energy output requires gravitational energy release so deep
within the host star that the prompt gamma rays should, upon naive
consideration, have been obscured. It is suggested that...
In recent decades, physicists and astronomers have discovered two
beautiful Standard Models, one for the quantum world of extremely
short distances, and one for the universe as a whole. Both models
have had spectacular success, but there are also...
Galaxies are the visible building blocks of the Universe,
astrophysical laboratories that have profoundly informed our
knowledge of cosmology and nature. Black holes—once a bizarre
mathematical consequence of Einstein’s relativity theory—are
now...
On March 21, 2013, the most detailed map of the infant universe
to date was publicly released, showing relic radiation from the Big
Bang, imprinted when the universe was just 380,000 years old. This
was the first release of cosmological data from...
Persistent homology is a central object of study in applied
topology. It offers a flexible framework for defining invariants,
called barcodes, of point cloud data and of real valued functions.
Many of the key results of the last several years in the...
We will discuss the notion of loops in linguistic structures,
mainly in dictionaries. In a simplified view, a dictionary is a
graph that links every word (vertex) to a set of alternative words
(the definition) which in turn point to further...
Our present framework for physics is difficult to modify without
destroying its marvelous, successful properties. This provides a
strong check on theoretical speculations and helps guide us to a
small set of candidates for new laws. In this talk, Ni...
