I will describe Bilu's equidistribution theorem for roots of polynomials, and explain some implications this has on entropy of toral automorphisms.

Entropy was first defined for actions of the integers by Kolmogorov in 1958 and then extended to actions of countable amenable groups by Kieffer in 1975. Recently, there has been a surge of research in entropy theory following groundbreaking work of Lewis Bowen in 2008 which defined entropy for actions of sofic groups. In this mini-course I will cover these recent developments. I will carefully define the notions of sofic entropy (for actions of sofic groups) and Rokhlin entropy (for actions of general countable groups), discuss many of the main results, and go through some of the proofs.

Abstract: The automorphism group of a subshift $(X,\sigma)$ is the group of homeomorphisms of $X$ that commute with $\sigma$. It is known that such groups can be extremely large for positive entropy subshifts (like full shifts or mixing SFT). In this talk I will present some recent progress in the understanding of the opposite case, the low complexity one. I will show that automorphism groups are highly constrained for low complexity subshifts. For instance, for a minimal subshifts with sublinear complexity the automorphism group is generated by the shift and a finite set.

Abstract: We use a geometric idea to give an analytic estimate for the word-length in the pure braid group of S^2. This yields that the L^1-norm (and hence each L^p-norm, including L^2) on the group of area-preserving diffeomorphisms of S^2 is unbounded. This solves an open question arising from the work of Shnirelman and Eliashberg-Ratiu. Joint work in progress with Michael Brandenbursky.

Abstract:

Abstract: The unit circle viewed as a Riemannian manifold has diameter (not 2 but rather) π, illustrating the difference between intrinsic and ambient distance. Gromov proceeded to erase the difference by pointing out that when a Riemannian manifold is embedded in L∞, the intrinsic and the ambient distances coincide in a way that is as counterintuitive as it is fruitful. Witness the results of his 1983 Filling paper.

Abstract: The classical theorem of Van Kampen and Flores states that the k-dimensional skeleton of (2k+2)-dimensional simplex cannot be embedded into R2k.
We present a version of this theorem for chain maps and as an application we prove a qualitative topological Helly-type theorem.
If we define the Helly number of a finite family of sets to be one if all sets in the family have a point in common and as the largest size of inclusion-minimal subfamily with empty intersection otherwise, the theorem can be stated as follows:

**Note the special location**
Abstract:

Abstract:
In this pair of talks I will discuss how to obtain fixed-point expressions
for open Gromov-Witten invariants. The talks will be self-contained,
and the second talk will only require a small part of the first talk,
which we will review.
The Atiyah-Bott localization formula has become a valuable tool for
computation of symplectic invariants given in terms of integrals on
the moduli spaces of closed stable maps. In contrast, the moduli spaces
of open stable maps have boundary which must be taken into account