This is not a mathematics talk but it is a talk for mathematicians. Too often, we think of historical mathematicians as only names assigned to theorems. With vignettes and anecdotes, I'll convince you they were also human beings and that, as the Chinese say, "May you live in interesting times" really is a curse. Among the mathematicians with vignettes are Riemann, Newton, Poincare, von Neumann, Kato, Loewner, Krein and Noether. This talk is in two parts. The second part will be given from 4:00 to 5:00 (not 5:30) in the Basic Notions seminar.

We establish topological local rigidity for uniform lattices in compactly generated groups, extending the result of Weil from the realm of Lie groups. We generalize the classical local rigidity theorem of Selberg, Calabi and Weil to irreducible uniform lattices in Isom(X) where X is a proper CAT(0) space with no Euclidian factors, not isometric to the hyperbolic plane. We deduce an analog of Wang’s finiteness theorem for certain non-positively curved metric spaces. This is a joint work with Arie Levit.

Abstract: In 1934, Loewner proved a remarkable and deep theorem about matrix monotone functions. Recently, the young Finnish mathematician, Otte Heinävarra settled a 10 year old conjecture and found a 2 page proof of a theorem in Loewner theory whose only prior proof was 35 pages. I will describe his proof and use that as an excuse to discuss matrix monotone and matrix convex functions including, if time allows, my own recent proof of Loewner’s original theorem.

We will follow a short note by Artem Chernikov & Sergei Starchenko: "A note on the Erdos-Hajnal Conjecture." “In this short note we provide a relatively simple proof of the Erd ̋os–Hajnal conjecture for families of finite (hyper-)graphs without the m-order property. It was originally proved by M. Malliaris and S. Shelah”