Past Events

E.g., Aug 29, 2025

Geoffrey Schiebinger

University of British Columbia
Towards a Mathematical Theory of Development

November 1, 2024

ESB 2012

This talk introduces a mathematical theory of developmental biology, based on optimal transport. While, in principle, organisms are made of molecules whose motions are described by the Schödinger equation, there are simply too many molecules for this to be useful. Optimal transport provides a... Read more

Charlotte Ure

Illinois State University
Decomposition of cohomology classes in finite field extensions

November 1, 2024

ESB 4133

Rost and Voevodsky proved the Bloch-Kato conjecture relating Milnor k-theory and Galois cohomology. It implies that if a field F contains a primitive pth root of unity, then the Galois cohomology ring of F with coefficients in the trivial F-module with p elements is generated by elements of... Read more

  • Number Theory

Dominik Nowak


The Lorentz Gas in the Weak Coupling Regime: Derivation of the Linear Landau-Vlasov Equation

October 31, 2024

In-person talk in ESB 4133

We study the dynamics of a test particle in a system of $N$ randomly distributed stationary spherical obstacles (scatterers) in dimensions $d \geq 2$. We assume that the test particle's motion is influenced by two contributing factors. One contribution comes from collisions with scatterers,... Read more

  • Differential geometry
  • Mathematical Physics
  • Partial Differential Equations

Mathav Murugan

UBC
Diffusions and random walks with prescribed sub-Gaussian heat kernel estimates

October 30, 2024

We describe a solution to the inverse problem of constructing diffusions and random walks with prescribed sub-Gaussian heat kernel bounds with given volume growth and escape time profiles. Read more

  • Probability

Dr. Pras Pathmanathan

FDA (OSCEL)
Math-Bio: Computational Modeling for Medical Devices

October 30, 2024

ESB4133

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for ensuring the safety and effectiveness of medical devices marketed in the US. For several decades, in a handful of niche applications, medical device industry has used computational modeling to provide evidence for safety or effectiveness... Read more

  • Mathematical Biology

Balazs Elek

UBC
Affine Kazhdan-Lusztig varieties and Grobner bases

October 28, 2024

Math 126, UBC Math department

A Kazhdan-Lusztig variety is the intersection of a Schubert variety with an affine cell in a flag manifold. Therefore, one can obtain local equations for Schubert varieties by using coordinates on the affine cell. Building on the work of Fulton and Knutson/Miller, in finite type A, Woo and Yong... Read more

  • Algebra and Algebraic geometry

Mathav Murugan

UBC
Sobolev space on the Sierpinski carpet

October 25, 2024

ESB 2012 and Zoom

There is a well-developed theory of Sobolev spaces on metric measure spaces, stemming from the seminal works of Cheeger and Shanmugalingam in the 1990s. However, this notion does not lead to a suitable space for fractals. We develop an alternate approach to Sobolev spaces on the Sierpinski... Read more

Manish Patnaik


Borel-Serre type constructions for Loop Groups

October 25, 2024

ESB 4133

Joint work with Punya Satpathy

For a reductive group G, Borel and Serre introduced a compactification of a large class of arithmetic quotients of the symmetric space attached to G. After reviewing some aspects of their construction, we explain how to generalize it to the case... Read more

  • Number Theory

Paige Bright

UBC
Continuum Beck-Type Problems

October 23, 2024

ESB 4133 (PIMS Library)

Radial projections have been a quickly developing topic in harmonic analysis. The work of Orponen-Shmerkin-Wang connected this topic to a continuum Beck theorem for lines, finding a (lower) bound for the dimension of lines that contain at least two points in a given subset of $\mathbb{R}^n$.... Read more

  • Harmonic Analysis and Fractal Geometry

Johannes Baeumler

UCLA
A (dis)continuous percolation phase transition on the hierarchical lattice

October 23, 2024

For long-range percolation on $\mathbb{Z}$ with translation-invariant edge kernel $J$, it is a classical theorem of Aizenman and Newman (1986) that the phase transition is discontinuous when $J(x-y)$ is of order $|x-y|^{-2}$ and that there is no phase transition at all when $J(x-y)=o(|x-y|^{-2... Read more

  • Probability