2018 Oct 18

Basic Notions Seminar: Periods and Hodge theory, complex and p-adic

4:15pm to 5:30pm

Speaker: Ehud de Shalit
Title:Periods and Hodge theory, complex and p-adic
Complex theory
This will be a survey of complex Hodge theory, with applications to period maps and moduli and with an emphasis on the example of abelian varieties. It will cover classical results of Riemann, Siegel, Hodge and Griffiths
2018 Oct 15

NT & AG Lunch: Yakov Varshavsky "Mathematics around Langlands program"

1:00pm to 2:00pm

Location:

Faculty lounge, Math building

This is a new seminar, whose official name is "Topics in number theory
and algebraic geometry". At least in the beginning the goal
of the seminar will be to give a (relatively) gentle introduction to
various topics, which should be accessible to beginning but motivated graduate students.
The seminar has a number in the shnaton (80942), so graduate students
can get a credit for it.
First talk: The goal of this organizational/introductory talk will be to
describe areas of mathematics, connected to Langlands program.
2018 Dec 09

Kazhdan seminar: Tomer Schlank "The Nonabelian Chabauty Method"

12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location:

Ross 70A
Abstract: The Chabauty method is a remarkable tool which employs p-adic analitic methods (in particular Colman integration.) To study rational points on curves. However the method can be applied only when the genus of the curve in question is larger than its Mordell-Weil rank. Kim developed a sophisticated "nonableian" generalisation. We shall present the classical methid, and give an approachable introduction to Kim's method. I'm basically going to follow http://math.mit.edu/nt/old/stage_s18.html
2018 Oct 08

T&G: Stephan Rosebrock (Karlsruhe), Asphericity, Relative Asphericity and Labelled Oriented Trees

12:30pm to 2:00pm

Location:

Room 70, Ross Building, Jerusalem, Israel
The Whitehead conjecture asks whether a subcomplex of an aspherical 2-complex is always aspherical. This question is open since 1941. Howie has shown that the existence of a finite counterexample implies (up to the Andrews-Curtis conjecture) the existence of a counterexample within the class of labelled oriented trees. Labelled oriented trees are algebraic generalisations of Wirtinger presentations of knot groups.
2018 Nov 18

Special Analysis Seminar: Sergey Denisov (Wisconsin) "Szego theorem for measures on the real line: optimal results and applications"

12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location:

Manchester building, room 209
Title: Szego theorem for measures on the real line: optimal results and applications. Abstract: Measures on the unit circle for which the logarithmic integral converges can be characterized in many different ways: e.g., through their Schur parameters or through the predictability of the future from the past in Gaussian stationary stochastic process. In this talk, we consider measures on the real line for which logarithmic integral exists and give their complete characterization in terms of the Hamiltonian in De Branges canonical system. This provides a generalization of the
2019 Jan 07

Combinatorics: Bruno Benedetti (U. Miami) "Local constructions of manifolds"

11:00am to 1:00pm

Location:

CS building, room B500, Safra campus, Givat Ram
Speaker: Bruno Benedetti, U. Miami Title: Local constructions of manifolds Abstract: Starting with a tree of tetrahedra, say you are allowed to recursively glue together some two boundary triangles that have nonempty intersection. You may perform this type of move as many times you want. Let us call "Mogami manifolds" the triangulated 3-manifolds (with or without boundary) that can be obtained this way. Mogami, a quantum physicist, conjectured in 1995 that all triangulated 3-balls are Mogami. This conjecture implies an important one in discrete quantum gravity
2018 Dec 10

Erdos lecture I: Counting linear extensions and Young tableaux

Lecturer:

Igor Pak (UCLA)
11:00am to 1:00pm

Location:

IIAS, lecture hall 130, Safra campus, Givat Ram
Speaker: Igor Pak, UCLA Title: Counting linear extensions. Abstract: I will survey various known and recent results on counting the number of linear extensions of finite posets. I will emphasize the asymptotic and complexity aspects for special families, where the problem is especially elegant yet remains #P-complete. In the second half of the talk I will turn to posets corresponding to (skew) Young diagrams. This special case is important for many applications in representation theory and algebraic geometry.
2018 Oct 29

Combinatorics: Noam Lifshitz, BIU, "Sharp thresholds for sparse functions with applications to extremal combinatorics."

11:00am to 1:00pm

Location:

Rothberg CS blgd, room B500, Safra campus, Givat, Ram
Speaker: Noam Lifshitz, BIU Title: Sharp thresholds for sparse functions with applications to extremal combinatorics. Abstract: The sharp threshold phenomenon is a central topic of research in the analysis of Boolean functions. Here, one aims to give sufficient conditions for a monotone Boolean function $f$ to satisfy $\mu_{p}(f)=o(\mu_{q}(f))$, where $q = p + o(p)$, and $\mu_{p}(f)$ is the probability that $f=1$ on an input with independent coordinates, each taking the value $1$ with probability $p$.
2018 Oct 15

Combinatorics: Tammy Ziegler, HU, "Extending weakly polynomial functions from high rank varieties"

11:00am to 1:00pm

Location:

Rothberg CS building, room B500, Safra campus, Givat Ram
Speaker: Tammy Ziegler, HU Title: Extending weakly polynomial functions from high rank varieties Abstract: Let k be a field, V a k-vector space, X in V a subset. Say that f: X —> k is weakly polynomial of degree a if its restriction to any isotropic subspace is a polynomial degree of a. We show that if X is a high rank variety then any weakly polynomial function of degree a is the restriction to X of a polynomial of degree a on V. Joint work with D. Kazhdan.
2018 Nov 05

Combinatorics: Ohad Klein, BIU, "Biased halfspaces, noise sensitivity, and local Chernoff inequalities"

11:00am to 1:00pm

Location:

Rothberg CS bldg, room B500, Safra campus, Givat Ram
Speaker: Ohad Klein, BIU Title: Biased halfspaces, noise sensitivity, and local Chernoff inequalities Abstract: Let X be a random variable defined by X=\sum_i a_i x_i where x_i are independent random variables uniformly distributed in \{-1, 1\}, and a_i in R, the reals. Assume Var(X)=1=sum a_{i}^2. We investigate the tail behavior of the variable X, and apply the results to study halfspace functions f:{-1,1}^{n}-->{-1,1} defined by f(x)=1 (\sum_i a_i x_i > t) for some t in R. A puzzle: Let a = max_{i} |a_{i}|. Is it true that Pr[|X| \leq a] \geq a/10?
2018 Oct 22

Combinatorics: Spencer Backman, HU, "Cone valuations, Gram's relation, and flag-angles"

11:00am to 1:00pm

Location:

Rothberg CS building, room B500, Safra campus, Givat Ram
Speaker: Spencer Backman, HU Title: Cone valuations, Gram's relation, and flag-angles
2018 Dec 19

Analysis Seminar: Dmitry Ryabogin (Kent) "On a local version of the fifth Busemann-Petty Problem"

12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location:

Ross Building, Room 70
Title: On a local version of the fifth Busemann-Petty Problem Abstract: In 1956, Busemann and Petty posed a series of questions about symmetric convex bodies, of which only the first one has been solved. Their fifth problem asks the following. Let K be an origin symmetric convex body in the n-dimensional Euclidean space and let H_x be a hyperplane passing through the origin orthogonal to a unit direction x. Consider a hyperplane G parallel to H_x and supporting to K and let C(K,x)=vol(K\cap H_x)dist (0, G).
2018 Dec 04

Dynamics Lunch: Manuel Luethi "Well approximable numbers and times n invariant probability measures on the torus after Einsiedler, Fishman and Shapira."

12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location:

Manchester faculty club
2019 Apr 10

Analysis Seminar: Gregory Berkolaiko (Texas A&M) "Nodal statistics of graph eigenfunctions"

12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location:

Ross 70
Title: Nodal statistics of graph eigenfunctions Abstract: Understanding statistical properties of zeros of Laplacian eigenfunctions is a program which is attracting much attention from mathematicians and physicists. We will discuss this program in the setting of "quantum graphs", self-adjoint differential operators acting on functions living on a metric graph. Numerical studies of quantum graphs motivated a conjecture that the distribution of nodal surplus (a suitably rescaled number of zeros of the n-th eigenfunction) has a universal form: it approaches Gaussian
2019 Mar 27

Analysis Seminar: Ofer Zeitouni (Weizmann) "Perturbations of non-normal matrices"

12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location:

Ross 70
Title: Perturbations of non-normal matrices Abstract: Eigenvalues of Hermitian matrices are stable under perturbations in the sense that the $l_p$ norm of the difference between (ordered)eigenvalues is bounded by the Schatten norm of the perturbation. A similar control does not hold for non-Normal matrices. In the talk, I will discuss