Abstract: A Markov chain over a finite state space is said to exhibit the total variation cutoff phenomenon if, starting from some Dirac measure, the total variation distance to the stationary distribution drops abruptly from near maximal to near zero. It is conjectured that simple random walks on the family of $k$-regular, transitive graphs with a two sided $\epsilon$ spectral gap exhibit total variation cutoff (for any fixed $k$ and $\epsilon). This is known to be true only in a small number of cases.
1) Abstract of Wayne's part:
Today, in our modern world, we perceive the physical universe in mathematical terms; whether degrees on longitude and latitude on earth, or in units of space-time beyond our earthly horizons. This talk will present two ancient cuneiform tablets from Babylonia which offer a geometric impression of the physical world as experienced by ancient Babylonians. Comparisons will be made with a range of other ancient mathematical, geographic, and astronomical materials from the cuneiform Ancient Near East.
2) Abstract of Mourtaza's part:
Categoricity relative to order and order stability
In this talk we will show a generalization of the notion of stability and categoricity relative to the order. One of the natural questions is whether categoricity implies stability, just like in the regular case. We will show that this is not true generally, by using a result of Pabion on peano arithmetic. We are also going to see some specific cases where categoricity relative to the order implies stability.
Abstract: Cut and project point sets are defined by identifying a strip of a fixed n-dimensional lattice (the "cut"), and projecting the lattice points in that strip to a d-dimensional subspace (the "project"). Such sets have a rich history in the study of mathematical models of quasicrystals, and include well known examples such as the Fibonacci chain and vertex sets of Penrose tilings.
Speaker: Eyal Karni (BIU)
Title: Combinatorial high dimensional expanders
Abstract:
An eps-expander is a graph G=(V,E) in which every set of vertices X where |X|<=|V|/2 satisfies |E(X,X^c)|>=eps*|X| . There are many edges that "go out" from any relevant set.
