Stanford University

Past Events

Friday, May 15, 2020
2:00 PM
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Zoom
Cole Graham (Stanford)

In a disordered potential, eigenfunctions of the Schrödinger operator localize in seemingly unpredictable places. Recently, Filoche and Mayboroda discovered an effective potential which magically governs the structure of eigenfunctions. In this talk, we'll examine the predictive power…

Friday, May 15, 2020
12:30 PM
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Zoom
Alexander Dunlap (Stanford)
Friday, May 15, 2020
12:00 PM
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Zoom
Rob Silversmith (Northeastern)

Given a homogeneous ideal I in a polynomial ring, one may apply the following combinatorial operation: for each degree d, make a list of all subsets S of the set of degree-d monomials such that S is the set of nonzero coefficients of an element of I. For each d, this set of subsets is a…

Friday, May 15, 2020
10:45 AM
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Zoom
Rohini Ramadas (Brown)

A degree d>1 self-map f of P^n is called post critically finite (PCF) if its critical hypersurface C_f is pre-periodic for f, that is, if there exist integers r ≥ 0 and k>0 such that f^{r+k}(C_f) is contained in f^{r}(C_f). 

I will discuss the question: what does the locus of…

Wednesday, May 13, 2020
3:15 PM
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Zoom
Daniel Stern (U Toronto)

I'll describe recent work with Mikhail Karpukhin, in which we relate the problem of maximizing Laplacian eigenvalues over unit-area metrics on a given Riemann surface to natural variational constructions of harmonic maps to high-dimensional spheres. Our results give a new proof of the existence…

Wednesday, May 13, 2020
2:00 PM
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Zoom
Joj Helfer (Stanford)

We will take a journey to a strange and distant land (called France) where "cohomology" is pronounced "derived pushforward of the constant sheaf to a point". We will make a bunch of definitions and, إن شاء الله, prove something.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020
11:00 AM
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Zoom - please join listserv or email Jared for link
Jared Marx-Kuo (Stanford)

In this talk, we will continue our discussion of Yang-Mills theory and provide some perspective on the usage of Lagrangians in solving the Yang-Mills equation. In addition, we will explore how the Yang-Mills field is a generalization of the electromagnetic-field which can be applied in other…

Tuesday, May 12, 2020
4:00 PM
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Zoom
Benjamin Foster (U Penn)

The Fourier transform associates a polynomial to each linear differential operator with constant coefficients, and a formal calculation shows that elements in the kernel of such a differential operator have their Fourier transforms supported on the vanishing set of that polynomial. For…

Tuesday, May 12, 2020
4:00 PM
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Zoom
Clayton McDonald (Boston College)

A knot K in S^3 is slice if it is the cross section of an embedded sphere in S^4, and it is doubly slice if the sphere is unknotted. Although slice knots are very well studied, doubly slice knots have been given comparatively less attention. We prove that an odd pretzel knot is doubly slice if…

Monday, May 11, 2020
4:00 PM
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Online
Jonathan Hermon (UBC)

We consider the random Cayley graph of a finite group $G$ formed by picking $k$ random generators uniformly at random:

  1. We prove universality of cutoff for the random walk, provided $k-d(G) >> 1$ where $d(G)$ is the size of the smallest generating set of $G$. As conjectured…