It is time again to prepare for the VTRMC -- The Virginia Tech Regional Mathematics Contest, which is sponsored by the Mathematics Department at Virginia Tech. The contest began in 1979 and has grown to the point where over 100 schools with over 700 contestants participate in a typical year. This year's VTRMC competition will take place on - Saturday October 22, 2022, 9:00 AM-11:30…
Ed Witten's papers in 1988 drew out the connection between Jones Polynomials of Knots and Chern-Simons theory of 3-dimensional TQFT. Following his work, Reshetikhin and Turaev formulated invariants of 3-manifolds via colored framed knots leading to new TQFTs. In this talk, I will introduce Dehn Surgery on knots, framed knots colored with representations of Hopf…
Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a non-invasive imaging modality that requires recovering the initial data of the wave equation from certain measurements of the solution outside the object. In the standard PAT, the measured data consist of time-dependent signals measured on an observation surface. In contrast, the measured data from the recently invented full-field detection technique…
A free boundary minimal surface (FBMS) in a given three-dimensional Riemannian manifold is a critical point of the area functional with respect to variations that constrain its boundary to the boundary of the ambient manifold. We will talk about the existence of FBMS, with particular emphasis on an equivariant min-max method and on the computation…
Speaker’s webpage: https://users.wfu.edu/masonsk/ Location: Jointly in person and virtually on Zoom. SAS 2225 for in-person participation. The Zoom link is sent out to the Algebra and Combinatorics mailing list, please contact Corey Jones at cmjones6@ncsu.edu to be added.
During the preparation of a foundational chapter on manifolds of mappings for a book on geometric continuum mechanics I found out that the following object behaves surprisingly well as source of a manifold of mappings: — A Whitney manifold germ M˜ ⊃ M consists of an open manifold M˜ together with a closed subset M…
This session's talks: - Ian Bunner: TeX-hacking for creating instructional materials - Ashley Tharp: Scaffolding - Stepan Paul: Double integrals without volume - Nathan Reading: How WebAssign lies to students Once per semester, the Teaching and Learning Seminar will host 10-minute "lightning talks" in which 4 graduate students and/or faculty members will talk about some…
In this talk, we begin by introducing the audience to some fundamentals of differential geometry of surfaces in ℝ3, focusing on curvature and the adequately named first and second fundamental forms. We will discuss what special parameterizations and properties give rise to isothermic surfaces. Equipped with these tools, we will look at the fundamental theorem for surfaces,…
Zombies are popularly presented in media as resulting from an infectious outbreak. Various modeling assumptions for zombification as an infectious disease are discussed. Populations during the outbreak are then modeled with infectious disease compartment models accounting for various effects such as latent infectious populations, quarantining, etc. Equilibrium and stability conditions for these dynamics are determined,…
Advisor Medhin, contact for Zoom access.
A major challenge in the study of dynamical systems is that of model discovery: turning data into reduced order models that are not just predictive, but provide insight into the nature of the underlying dynamical system that generated the data. We introduce a number of data-driven strategies for discovering nonlinear multiscale dynamical systems and their…
Categorification is a method that has many emanations hence eludes a precise definition. Therefore, we will discuss categorification through several examples of categorifying polynomials arising from different fields of mathematics, including knots, graphs, and orthogonal polynomials. Speaker’s webpage: https://sazdanovic.wordpress.ncsu.edu/ Location: Jointly in person and virtually on Zoom. SAS 2225 for in-person participation. The Zoom link is sent out…
In this talk, I will first present a very simple quantitative form of the Young-Fenchel inequality. I will then discuss some applications: a short proof of the Brøndsted-Rockafellar in Hilbert spaces and a primal-dual attainment for perturbed convex minimization problems. I will finally explain how this inequality (or some generalizations) can be used for quantitative…
During this presentation we will discuss the topics like how to find interesting conferences in your field, how to apply for funding, what you should prepare before the conference, what to do while at the conference, and how to make your trip a fun and productive experience. There will be some discussion for those looking…
Marginal independence models have been commonly studied in the context of graphical models, where we use a graph to convey the different marginal independence relations between random variables. However, there are marginal independence relations that cannot be expressed with a graph, which is why we provide a more general framework in which we can define…
For social networks, nodes encode social entities, such as people, twitter accounts, etc., while edges encode relationship or events between entities. Opinion dynamics model opinion evolution as dynamical processes on social networks. Traditional models of opinion dynamics consider how opinions evolve either on time-independent networks or on temporal networks with edges that follow Poisson statistics.…
Let Σ be a closed surface (i.e. a 2-dimensional Riemannian manifold) satisfying the following condition: the first eigenvalue of the elliptic operator -Δ+βK is nonnegative, where K is the Gauss curvature and β is a positive constant . This condition was mainly motivated by the studies of positive scalar curvature in dimension three, and soon…
Given a modular category C, the irreducible characters of its fusion ring are in one-to-one correspondence with the set Irr(C) of isomorphism classes of simple objects of C. Consequently, the action of the absolute Galois group on these characters induces a permutation action on Irr(C). The analysis of this action is essential to the classification…
his talk presents various characterizations of the subdifferential of the pointwise supremum of an arbitrary family of convex functions, as well as some featured applications. Starting by the maximum generality framework, we move after to particular contexts in which some continuity and compacity assumptions are either imposed or inforced via processes of compactification of the…