Mutant knots are notoriously hard to distinguish. Many, but not all, knot invariants take the same value on mutant pairs. Khovanov homology with coefficients in Z/2Z is known to be mutation-invariant, while the bigraded knot Floer homology groups can distinguish mutants such as the famous Kinoshita-Terasaka and Conway pair. However, Baldwin and Levine conjectured that…
Dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area play a key role in signalling motivational information. Modulation of this signalling by drugs is also key to the development of addiction. These neurons have several firing modes ranging from periodic low frequency activity to higher frequency bursts. In vitro, intrinsically generated bursts are seen, while in vivo…
MGSA is hosting a game night on Friday, February 24 at 8:00pm to welcome the visitors for recruitment weekend. All current graduate students are welcome. This is a great opportunity for the visitors to interact with the grad students. MGSA will provide snacks and drinks.
What links gas molecules, charged particles, bacteria and fish? Partial differential equations help us understanding their collective behaviour. Kinetic modelling allows for a multi-scale strategy in a number of important applications in science and technology. Mean field limits and kinetic descriptions have become one of the most powerful tools in applied mathematics to bridge microscopic and…
During the last thirty years, several (families of) functionals have been defined which model self-avoidance: their values tend to infinity if an embedded object degenerates, e.g., if a sequence of closed simple curves converges to a curve with a self-intersection. Many of these functionals exhibit regularizing effects: they not only ensure embeddedness but in fact…
In honor of Pi Day, MGSA will provide pie in the 4th floor lounge of SAS on Tuesday, March 14 between 2:00-3:30 pm. Please stop by for a slice of pie, and feel free to bring some pie to share.
The Kaczmarz method is a numerical method to solve systems of linear equations and compute minimum-norm solutions of underdetermined systems. Because the method has very low memory requirements it has gained new attention in recent years. In this talk we propose a flexible algorithmic framework that extends the Kaczmarz method such that it also can…
Please join us for our weekly brown bag lunch! You bring your lunch, and we will bring a delicious treat. Everyone (not just women) is welcome to join or stop by for as long as they can!
Advised by Nathan Reading.
I will discuss some theoretical and numerical results on the stability properties of a dynamical system modeled by a nonlinear wave equation with a "degenerate" damping. The coefficient of the dissipation term is proportional to the amplitudes, hence its support depends on the geometry of the solution. This feature substantially complicates the stability analysis even…
You've probably heard some old guy rant about Newton's method and how it will solve all of your problems: linear, nonlinear, personal, laundry. There's more. In this talk I'll tell you about a way to accelerate plain vanilla fixed point iteration. The first theory for this stuff came from right here in SAS hall and…
The Schur-Weyl duality between the symmetric group and the general linear group allows us to connect the representation theory of these two groups. A consequence of this duality is the Frobenius formula which connects the irreducible characters of the general linear group and the symmetric group via symmetric functions. The symmetric group is also in…