Colloquium

When: 5 pm – 6 pm, February 17 (coming Monday) Where: Fine 314 Who: Prof. Paul Yang, whose interest lies in differential geometry and geometric analysis What: here are the title and abstracts   The isoperimetric problem on the Heisenberg Abstract: I will explain the geometry of a contact form in dimension three. The basic problem is to find the isoperimetric […]

Title: Communication complexity Location: Fine 224 Time: Wednesday 20th 5:00pm (NOT 6:00 pm) Abstract: Communication complexity studies the amount of communication that needs to be exchanged by parties to solve a problem on a distributed input. In this talk I will introduce communication complexity, and discuss several basic results and applications. No prior background will […]

This coming week we are pleased to have Professor Christine Taylor at the colloquium. Professor Taylor whose interests include mathematical biology will be talking about links between game theory and evolutionary biology. Please note that the talk will be on Monday, in Fine 314. Refreshments will be served. Hope to see you there! Title:   Some […]

When are how can we compute approximate solutions to NP-hard problems? Fine 214 Wenesday Nov.6th 6:00pm In the 1970s it was discovered that many computational problems in a variety of disciplines are NP-complete: they do not have efficient algorithms if  P != NP, as is widely believed. This was a profound discovery. However, in practice […]

On knot Floer homology on Wednesday October 16th at 6:00 pm, Fine 214 Note the Room is 214! There will be refreshments! Abstract: Knot Floer homology is an invariant for knots which is defined using techniques from symplectic geometry. I will start by asking a few basic questions about knots, and explain how this invariant […]

THE NASH PROBLEM FOR ARC SPACES Wednesday Oct 2nd Fine 214 6:00 pm Abstract: In a 1968 preprint, John Nash asked some very interesting questions about the family of all arcs on algebraic or analytic surfaces and hypersurfaces. I illustrate these questions using the examples of the surfaces (xy=z^n) and (x^2+y^3=z^4). I plan to end […]