UC Calculus Online

Speaker: 

Frank Bauerle and Tony Tromba

Institution: 

University of California, Santa Cruz

Time: 

Thursday, October 16, 2014 - 4:00pm to 5:15pm

Host: 

Location: 

Natural Sciences 2 (NS2) Room 2201

Frank Bäuerle and Tony Tromba from UC Santa Cruz, will describe UC's Calculus Online, now available to all UC students through our new cross campus enrollment system as well as to all non matriculated students including foreign nationals. Calculus I for Science and Engineering Students has been successfully running for over a year and Calculus II since the Spring. Calculus III and IV are currently in development.
The courses have many components, from introductory welcome lectures, historical enrichment video lectures, online lecture videos ( all synchronized with an online interactive e-text originally developed for print by UCLA Professor Jon Rogawski), to an online discussion forum platform all accessible via UC's Canvas Learning Management System. We would very much welcome questions and suggestions.

Dynamics of non-archimedean Polish groups

Speaker: 

Alexander Kechris

Institution: 

Caltech

Time: 

Thursday, April 17, 2014 - 4:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

RH306

Recently there has been considerable activity in the study of the dynamics of these groups and this work has led to interesting interactions between logic, finite combinatorics, group theory (both in the topological and algebraic context), topological dynamics, ergodic theory and representation theory. In this lecture I will give a survey of some of the main directions in this area of research.
 

Large-time behavior of bounded solutions of semilinear heat equations on the entire space

Speaker: 

Peter Polacik

Institution: 

University of Minnesota

Time: 

Thursday, May 8, 2014 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

Unlike their counterparts on bounded domains, semilinear heat equations on $R^N$ admit bounded solutions with very diverse large-time behavior. I will first present several examples of solutions with interesting and sometimes entertaining behavior in compact regions. Then I will discuss a few general results describing the behavior of more specific classes of solutions. Some ideas and techniques of more general interest, such as the Sturmian zero number and the method of spatial trajectories, will also be discussed. 

Rational points on elliptic and hyperelliptic curves

Speaker: 

Manjul Bhargava

Institution: 

Princeton University

Time: 

Thursday, February 27, 2014 - 4:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

RH306

Given a random elliptic or hyperelliptic curve of genus g over Q, how many rational points do we expect the curve to have? Equivalently, how often do we expect a random polynomial of degree n to take a square value over the rational numbers?  In this talk, we give an overview of recent conjectures and theorems giving some answers and partial answers to this question.

The triangulation conjecture

Speaker: 

Ciprian Manolescu

Institution: 

UCLA

Time: 

Thursday, March 6, 2014 - 4:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

RH306

The triangulation conjecture stated that any n-dimensional
topological manifold is homeomorphic to a simplicial complex. It is
true in dimensions at most 3, but false in dimension 4 by the work of
Casson and Freedman. In this talk I will explain the proof that the
conjecture is also false in higher dimensions. This result is based
on previous work of Galewski-Stern and Matumoto, who reduced the
problem to a question in low dimensions (the existence of elements of
order 2 and Rokhlin invariant one in the 3-dimensional homology
cobordism group). The low-dimensional question can be answered in the
negative using a variant of Floer homology, Pin(2)-equivariant
Seiberg-Witten Floer homology.

Tales of Our Forefathers

Speaker: 

Barry Simon

Institution: 

Caltech

Time: 

Thursday, May 1, 2014 - 4:00pm

Location: 

NS 1201

This is not a mathematics talk but it is a talk for mathematicians. Too
often, we think of historical mathematicians as only names assigned to theorems.
With vignettes and anecdotes, I'll convince you they were also human beings and that,
as the Chinese say,"May you live in interesting times" really is a curse.

Cantor sets and Cantor measures

Speaker: 

David Damanik

Institution: 

Rice University

Time: 

Thursday, April 3, 2014 - 4:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

RH306

A subset of the real line is called a Cantor set if it is compact,
perfect, and nowhere dense. Cantor sets arise in many areas; in this
talk we will discuss their relevance in the spectral theory of
Schr\"odinger operators. We discuss several results showing that the
spectrum of such an operator is a Cantor set, from the discovery of the
first example by Moser to a genericity result by Avila, Bochi, and
Damanik. A Cantor measure is a probability measure on the real line
whose topological support is a Cantor set. A primary example in the
spectral theory context is the density of states measure in situations
where the spectrum is a Cantor set. A conjecture of Simon claims a
strict inequality between the dimensions of the set and the measure for
the Fibonacci potential. If time permits, we will discuss a recent
result of Damanik, Gorodetski, and Yessen, which establishes this
conjecture in full generality.

Missing values of polynomial maps

Speaker: 

Hendrik Lenstra Jr.

Institution: 

Universiteit Leiden

Time: 

Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

NSII 1201

Given a polynomial map between two vector spaces over a field,
how many values can it miss? The lecture will present a number of
new results on this question. They were inspired by the work of
Daqing Wan, and obtained jointly with Michiel Kosters (Leiden).

Modern Geometry: from Local to Global, from Smooth to Rough, from Static to Dynamic

Speaker: 

Jean-Pierre Bourguignon

Institution: 

IHES and Stanford

Time: 

Thursday, November 7, 2013 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

NSII 1201

In the last century, Geometry underwent several
substantial extensions and revisions based on
the fundamental revolutions that it lived through
in the XIXth century.

The purpose of the lecture is to discuss several
aspects of these transformations: the new
concepts that emerged from these new points
of view, the new perspectives that could be
drawn from bringing together the continuous and
discrete viewpoints, some classical problems that could
be solved, and the new interactions with other
disciplines that went along.

It includes the presentation of the views of the late Professor
Chern Shiing Shen on some of these issues.

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