2016 Mar 03

# Colloquium: Sara Tukachinsky (Hebrew University) "Counts of holomorphic disks by means of bounding chains"

3:30pm to 4:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
Over a decade ago, Welschinger defined invariants of real symplectic manifolds of complex dimensions 2 and 3, which count pseudo-holomorphic disks with boundary and interior point constraints. Since then, the problem of extending the definition to higher dimensions has attracted much attention.
2016 May 05

# Colloquium: Daniel Wise (McGill) "The Cubical Route to Understanding Groups"

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
Abstract: Cube complexes have come to play an increasingly central role within geometric group theory, as their connection to right-angled Artin groups provides a powerful combinatorial bridge between geometry and algebra. This talk will introduce nonpositively curved cube complexes, and then describe the developments that have recently culminated in the resolution of the virtual Haken conjecture for 3-manifolds, and simultaneously dramatically extended our understanding of many infinite groups.
2015 Nov 12

# Colloquium: Michael Krivelevich (Tel Aviv), "Positional games"

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
Title: Positional games Positional games are a branch of combinatorics, researching a variety of two-player games, ranging from popular recreational games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Hex, to purely abstract games played on graphs and hypergraphs. It is closely connected to many other combinatorial disciplines such as Ramsey theory, extremal graph and set theory, probabilistic combinatorics, and to computer science.
2016 Dec 15

# Colloquium: Cy Maor (Toronto) "Asymptotic rigidity of manifolds"

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
Liouville's rigidity theorem (1850) states that a map $f:\Omega\subset R^d \to R^d$ that satisfies $Df \in SO(d)$ is an affine map. Reshetnyak (1967) generalized this result and showed that if a sequence $f_n$ satisfies $Df_n \to SO(d)$ in $L^p$, then $f_n$ converges to an affine map. In this talk I will discuss generalizations of these theorems to mappings between manifolds and sketch the main ideas of the proof (using techniques from the calculus of variations and from harmonic analysis). Finally, I will describe how these rigidity questions are related to weak
2016 Jan 07

# Colloquium: Peter Ozsváth (Princeton), "Zabrodsky Lectures: Knot Floer homology"

3:30pm to 4:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
Abstract: Knot Floer homology is an invariant for knots, defined using methods from symplectic geometry. This invariant contains topological information about the knot, such as its Seifert genus; it can be used to give bounds on the unknotting number; and it can be used to shed light on the structure of the knot concordance group. I will outline the construction and basic properties of knot Floer. Knot Floer homology was originally defined in collaboration with Zoltan Szabo, and independently by Jacob Rasmussen.
2016 May 26

# Colloquium: John Lott (Berkeley) "3D Ricci flow since Perelman"

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
I’ll talk about the advances and open questions in three dimensional Ricci flow. Topics include the finiteness of the number of surgeries, the long-time behavior and flowing through singularities. No prior knowledge of Ricci flow will be assumed.
2016 Dec 01

# Colloquium: Shaul Zemel (Hebrew University) "Actions of Groups on Compact Riemann Surfaces"

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
A compact Riemann surface gives rise to several families of vector spaces, associated to divisors on the Riemann surface. A finite group G of automorphisms acts on the spaces associated with invariant divisors, and a natural question is to characterize the resulting representations of G. We show how a very simple normalization for the invariant divisors can help in answering this question in a very direct manner, and if time permits present some applications.
2015 Dec 24

# Colloquium: Yakov Eliashberg (Stanford) ״Crossroads of symplectic rigidity and flexibility״

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
Abstract: The development of flexible and rigid sides of symplectic and contact topology towards each other shaped this subject since its inception, and continues shaping its modern development. In the talk I will discuss the history of this struggle and describe recent breakthroughs on the flexible side.
2016 Mar 31

# Colloquium: Ronen Eldan (Weizmann) "Interplays between stochastic calculus and geometric inequalities."

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
Abstract:
2016 Nov 17

# Colloquium: Boris Zilber (Oxford) " A model-theoretic semantics of algebraic quantum mechanics"

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
We approach the formalism of quantum mechanics from the logician point of view and treat the canonical commutation relations and the conventional calculus based on it as an algebraic syntax of quantum mechanics. We then aim to establish a geometric semantics of this syntax. This leads us to a geometric model, the space of states with the action of time evolution operators, which is a limit of finite models. The finitary nature of the space allows us to give a precise meaning and calculate various classical quantum mechanical quantities.
2015 Dec 03

# Colloquium: Ofer Zeitouni (Weizmann), "Extremes of logarithmically correlated fields"

2:30pm to 3:30pm

## Location:

Manchester Building (Hall 2), Hebrew University Jerusalem
Title: Extremes of logarithmically correlated fields Abstract: The general theory of Gaussian processes gives a recipe for estimating the maximum of a random field, which is neither easy to compute nor sharp enough for obtaining the law of the maximum. In recent years, much effort was invested in understanding the extrema of logarithmically correlated fields, both Gaussian and non-Gaussian. I will explain the motivation, and discuss some of the recent results and the techniques that have been involved in proving them.
2016 Jan 12

# Dynamics & prob. [NOTE SPECIAL TIME!!], Yonatan Gutman (IMPAN) - Optimal embedding of minimal systems into shifts on Hilbert cubes

1:45pm to 2:45pm

## Location:

Manchester building, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, (Room 209)
In the paper "Mean dimension, small entropy factors and an embedding theorem, Inst. Hautes Études Sci. Publ. Math 89 (1999) 227-262", Lindenstrauss showed that minimal systems of mean dimension less than $cN$ for $c=1/36$ embed equivariantly into the Hilbert cubical shift $([0,1]^N)^{\mathbb{Z}}$, and asked what is the optimal value for $c$. We solve this problem by proving that $c=1/2$. The method of proof is surprising and uses signal analysis sampling theory. Joint work with Masaki Tsukamoto.
2016 Jun 21

# Dynamics & probability: Fedor Pakovitch - On semiconjugate rational functions

2:00pm to 3:00pm

## Location:

Manchester building, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, (Room 209)
Let $A$, $B$ be two rational functions of degree at least two on the Riemann sphere. The function $B$ is said to be semiconjugate to the function $A$ if there exists a non-constant rational function $X$ such that the equality (*) A\circ X=X\circ B holds. The semiconjugacy relation plays an important role in the classical theory of complex dynamical systems as well as in the new emerging field of arithmetic dynamics. In the talk we present a description of solutions of (*) in terms of two-dimensional orbifolds of non-negative Euler characteristic on the Riemann sphere.
2016 May 31

# Dynamics & probability: Adi Glücksam (TAU): Translation invariant probability measures on the space of entire functions

2:00pm to 3:00pm

## Location:

Manchester building, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, (Room 209)
20 years ago Benjy Weiss constructed a collection of non-trivial translation invariant probability measures on the space of entire functions. In this talk we will present a construction of such a measure, and give upper and lower bounds for the possible growth of entire functions in the support of such a measure. We will also discuss "uniformly recurrent" entire functions, their connection to such constructions, and their possible growth. The talk is based on a joint work with Lev Buhovski, Alexander Loganov, and Mikhail Sodin.
2016 Apr 05

# Dynamics & probability: Grisha Derfel (BGU): “Diffusion on fractals and the Poincare's functional equation"

2:00pm to 3:00pm

## Location:

Manchester building, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, (Room 209)
We give a brief overview on applications of the Poincare's equation to the study of random walk on the the Sierpi ́nski gasket. In particular, we discuss such questions as anomalous diffusion, relation to branching processes and decimation invariance. Metods of the complex analysis and the iteration theory are used to deal with the aforemen-tioned problems.