Past Events
Around 1990, Prtzytcki and Turaev independently introduced the notion of a skein module of a 3-manifold M. This is a vector space spanned formally by all possible tangles drawn in M, subject to local "skein" relations allowing one to algorithmically simplify crossings, precisely as in the…
If you hire a sculptor to make you a statue, but demand that she only be able to use the tools of a carpenter, what you will get is a table. Let us together pay a visit to the sculptor, and here what she has to say about sculpting, from her own point of view.
Abstract
I will talk about two sampling methods: a splitting Monte Carlo and the Stein Variational Gradient Descent. The former can be viewed as a special case of the Metropolis MCMC method while the latter is a nonparametric variational inference method. We then apply the random batch ideas to reduce…
In this talk, we will discuss the tenants of music theory and how it boils down to solving the wave equation on a string of finite length. Delving into different intonations, we will show how western music is built on a very particular division of an octave, i.e. the range of frequencies [f, 2f…
The Betti numbers of the Hilbert scheme of points on a smooth, irreducible projective surface have been computed by Gottsche. These numbers stabilize as the number of points tends to infinity. In contrast, the Betti numbers of moduli spaces of semistable sheaves on a surface are not known in…
What is the effect of excluding an induced subgraph on the global structure of a graph? While there do not seem to be general structural consequences, a conjecture of Erdős and Hajnal says that graphs with forbidden induced subgraphs behave very differently from general graphs; more…