In the classical settings of Anosov diffeomorphisms or more general locally maximal hyperbolic sets I describe a new approach for constructing equilibrium measures corresponding to some continuous potentials and for studying some of their ergodic properties. This approach is pure geometrical in its nature and uses no symbolic representations of the system. As a result it can be used to effect thermodynamics formalism for systems for which no symbolic representation is available such as partially hyperbolic systems.

A celebrated theorem of Duke states that Picard/Galois orbits of CM points on a complex modular curve, e.g. SL2(Z)\SL2(R)/SO2(R), equidistribute in the limit when the absolute value of the discriminant goes to infinity. Michel and Venkatesh have conjectured that a sequence of some 2-fold self-joinings of CM orbits equidistributes in the product space as long as it escapes any closed orbit of an intermediate subgroup, i.e. Hecke correspondences.

Speaker: Amir Yehudayoff (Technion) Title: An exposition to topological overlap in the plane Abstract: We shall discuss Gromov's proof for topological overlap in the plane. We will also consider a weighted version of Gromov's theorem and deduce a dual statement.

We will start be explaining the difficulties in constructing enumerative open Gromov-Witten theories, and mention cases we can overcome these difficulties and obtain a rich enumerative structure. We then restrict to one such case, and define the full genus 0 stationary open Gromov-Witten theory of maps to CP^1 with boundary conditions on RP^1, including descendents, together with its equivariant extension. We fully compute the theory.

Abstract: Given a smooth compact hypersurface in Euclidean space, one can show that there exists a unique smooth evolution starting from it, existing for some maximal time. But what happens after the flow becomes singular? There are several notions through which one can describe weak evolutions past singularities, with various relationship between them. One such notion is that of the level set flow.

In this talk we will consider the question of defining descendant invariants in open Gromov-Witten theory. In the closed Gromov-Witten theory, descendant invariants are constructed from Chern classes of certain tautological lines bundles which live on the moduli space of stable curves. The intersection numbers obtained from those classes (and other classes) can be incorporated in a generating function that satisfies various partial differential equations reflecting recurrence relations and which can sometimes be used to calculate the numbers explicitly.

Suppose Z/n acts on a manifold, then if it has a fixed point, the natural homomorphism Z/n --> Out(π) (π = the fundamental group) lifts to Aut(π). If π is centreless, and the aspherical manifold is locally symmetric and the action is isometric, the converse holds. We shall discuss the extent to which this observation is geometric and to what extent it's topological. (It will depend on M and it will depend on n). לאירוע הזה יש שיחת וידאו. הצטרף: https://meet.google.com/mcs-bwxr-iza

Let G be a group acting on a projective variety. If G is noncompact, the quotient space X/G is in general "bad". In this talk I will discuss two methods to make this quotient "good", i.e. GIT and symplectic reduction. Both methods include the idea of keeping "good orbits" and throwing away "bad orbits". Hilbert-Mumford criterion provides a way to distinguish good orbits (which are called stable orbits) and the Kempf-Ness theorem tells us two methods produce the same quotient space. I will use several examples to show how Hilbert-Mumford criterion and the Kempf-Ness theorem work.

This talk revolves around the question of how close is one Riemannian manifold to being isometrically immersible in another. We associate with every mapping $f:(M,g) \to (N,h)$ a measure of distortion - an average distance of $df$ from being an isometry. Reshetnyak's theorem states that a sequence of mappings between Euclidean domains whose distortion tends to zero has a subsequence converging to an isometry. I will present a generalization of Reshetnyak’s theorem to the general Riemannian setting.

Mirror symmetry is a far reaching duality relating symplectic geometry on a given manifold to complex geometry on a completely different manifold - its mirror. Toric Calabi Yau manifolds are a large family of examples which which have served as a testing ground for numerous ideas in the study of mirror symmetry. I will prove homological mirror symmetry when the symplectic side is a toric Calabi-Yau 3-fold. I will aim to explain geometrically why the mirror of a toric Calabi Yau takes the particular form it does.

Being the gradient flow of the area functional, the mean curvature flow can be thought of as a greedy algorithm for simplifying embedded shapes. But how successful is this algorithm? In this talk, I will describe three examples for how mean curvature flow, as well as its variants and weak solutions, can be used to achieve this desired simplification. The first is a short time smoothing effect of the flow, allowing to smooth out some rough, potentially fractal initial data.

By a Fourier quasicrystal we mean a pure point measure in R^d, whose Fourier transform is also a pure point measure. This notion was inspired by the experimental discovery of quasicrystalline materials in the middle of 80's. The classical example of such a measure comes from Poisson's summation formula. Which other measures of this type may exist? I will give the relevant background on this problem and present our recent results obtained in joint work with Alexander Olevskii.

I will survey various approximation properties of finitely generated groups and explain how they can be used to prove various longstanding conjectures in the theory of groups and group rings. A large class of groups (no group known to be not in the class) is presented that satisfy the Kervaire-Laudenbach Conjecture about solvability of non-singular equations over groups. Our method is inspired by seminal work of Gerstenhaber-Rothaus, which was the key to prove the Kervaire-Laudenbach Conjecture for residually finite groups.