Past Events

E.g., Jan 19, 2025

Yinon Spinka

Tel-Aviv University
Phase transitions and finitary codings

January 17, 2025

ESB 2012 and Zoom

In this talk we will explore the connection between the two seemingly unrelated concepts appearing in the title. Phase transitions occur when a system undergoes an abrupt change in behaviour as a consequence of a small change in parameters. While phase transitions are evidently observed in the... Read more

  • Probability

Yinon Spinka

Tel-Aviv University
Random Lipschitz functions on trees

January 16, 2025

MATH 126

A Lipschitz function on a graph G is a function f:V->Z from the vertex set of the graph to the integers which changes by at most 1 along any edge of the graph. Given a finite connected graph G, and fixing the value of the function to be 0 on at least one vertex, we may sample such a Lipschitz... Read more

  • Probability

Nicolle Gonzalez

Berkeley
Representations of the Double Dyck Path Algebra and Beyond

January 14, 2025

ESB 4133 (PIMS library)

The shuffle theorem is a celebrated result in algebraic combinatorics that identifies three objects: the Frobenius character of certain $S_n$ representations, the action of the elliptic Hall algebra on symmetric functions, and a particular combinatorial expression in terms of labeled lattice... Read more

  • Discrete mathematics

Dr. Daniel (Sang Woo) Park

University of Chicago
Community ecology of infectious disease pathogens

January 14, 2025

Michael Smith Laboratories

The human population presents a unique ecosystem for studying pathogen communities, with anthropogenic activities like COVID-19 lockdowns serving as large-scale natural experiments. In this talk, I begin by exploring how host immune response facilitate the invasion and persistence of novel... Read more

  • Mathematical Biology

Dr. Daniel (Sang Woo) Park


Community ecology of infectious disease pathogens

January 14, 2025

Room 102: Lecture Theatre - Michael Smith Laboratories

The human population presents a unique ecosystem for studying pathogen communities, with anthropogenic activities like COVID-19 lockdowns serving as large-scale natural experiments. In this talk, I begin by exploring how host immune response facilitate the invasion and persistence of novel... Read more

  • Mathematical Biology

Nicolle Gonzalez

UC Berkeley
From Combinatorics to Knot Theory (and Back Again)

January 13, 2025

MATX 1100 and Zoom

Catalan numbers are among the most ubiquitous objects in mathematics, arising naturally in combinatorics, representation theory, geometry, and many other areas. Although there are various polynomial generalizations of these numbers, particularly fruitful are the so-called ( q , t ) -Catalan... Read more

Sanath Devalapurkar

Harvard
TBA

January 13, 2025

Math 126, UBC Math department

TBA Read more

  • Algebra and Algebraic geometry

Jonathan Tidor

Stanford
Discrete geometry via semialgebraic graph theory

January 10, 2025

ESB 2012 and Zoom

Many problems in discrete geometry can be conveniently encoded by a structure known as a semialgebraic graph. These problems include the Erdős unit distance problem and many of its variants, point-line incidence problems studied by Szemerédi–Trotter and by Guth–Katz, general problems about... Read more

Jonathan Tidor

Stanford
Ramsey and Turán numbers of sparse hypergraphs

January 9, 2025

MATH 126

The degeneracy of a graph is a measure of sparseness that gives important information about its Ramsey- and Turán-type properties. I will talk about the hypergraph extension of these problems. The typical notion of hypergraph degeneracy does not give any information about either the Ramsey or... Read more

  • Discrete mathematics

Noah Kravitz

Princeton
Lonely runners

January 8, 2025

MATH 102 and Zoom

Dirichlet's Theorem, the foundational result of Diophantine approximation, says that for any real number t, there is some natural number v in {1,2,...,n} such that tv lies within 1/(n+1) of an integer. The Lonely Runner Conjecture of Wills and Cusick asserts that the constant 1/(n+1) in this... Read more