Horseshoes in Multidimensional Scaling

Speaker: 

Professor Sharad Goel

Institution: 

USC

Time: 

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - 11:00am

Location: 

MSTB 254

Classical multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a method for visualizing high-dimensional point clouds by mapping to low-dimensional Euclidean space. This mapping is defined in terms of eigenfunctions of a matrix of interpoint proximities. I'll discuss MDS applied to a specific dataset: the 2005 United States House of Representatives roll call votes. In this case, MDS outputs 'horseshoes' that are characteristic of dimensionality reduction techniques. I'll show that in general, a latent ordering of the data gives rise to these patterns when one only has local information. That is, when only the interpoint distances for nearby points are known accurately. Our results provide insight into manifold learning in the special case where the manifold is a curve. This work is joint with Persi Diaconis and Susan Holmes.

Hamiltonian Stationary Shrinkers and Expanders for Lagrangian Mean Curvature Flows

Speaker: 

Yng-Ing Li

Institution: 

National Taiwan University

Time: 

Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 3:00pm

Location: 

MSTB 254

In this talk, I will report a recent joint work with Mu-Tao Wang. We construct examples of shrinkers and expanders for Lagrangian mean curvature flows. These examples are Hamiltonian stationary and asymptotic to the union of two Hamiltonian stationary cones found by Schoen and Wolfson. The Schoen-Wolfson cones are obstructions to the existence problems of special Lagragians or Lagrangian minimal surfaces in the variational approach. It is known that these cone singularities cannot be resolved by any smooth Lagrangian submanifolds. The shrinkers and expanders that we found can be glued together to yield solutions of the Brakke motion-a weak formulation of the mean curvature flow, and thus provide a canonical way to resolve the union of two such cone singularities. Our theorem is analogus to the Feldman-Ilmanen-Knopf gluing construction for the K\"ahler-Ricci flows.

Surface metrics that maximize the first eigenvalue after Nadirashvili

Speaker: 

Andrejs Treibergs

Institution: 

Utah and UCI

Time: 

Monday, March 5, 2007 - 3:00pm

Location: 

MSTB 254

I'll discuss the papers "Berger's isoperimetric problem and minimal
immersions of surfaces" by Nadirashvili, "Extremal metric for the first
eigenvalue on a Klein Bottle" by Jakobson, Nadirashvili and Polterovich
and "How large can the first eigenvalue be on a surface of genus two?" by
Jakobson, Levitin, Nadirashvili, Nigam and Polterovich. The authors find
among metrics of fixed area one that maximizes the fundamental frequency
of the torus and Klein Bottle.

The 16th Hilbert problem, a story of mystery, mistakes and solution

Speaker: 

Professor Oleg Viro

Institution: 

Uppsala University

Time: 

Thursday, March 8, 2007 - 4:00pm

Location: 

MSTB 254

Hilbert's problem of the topology of algebraic curves and surfaces (the
16th problem from the famous list presented at the second International
Congress of Mathematicians in 1900) was difficult to formulate. The way it
was formulated made it difficult to anticipate that it has been solved. I
believe it has, and this happened more than thirty years ago, although the
World Mathematical Community missed to acknowledge this.

Dynamic Depletion of Vortex Stretching and Dynamic Stability of 3D Incompressible Flow

Speaker: 

Professor Thomas Hou

Institution: 

Caltech

Time: 

Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 11:00am

Location: 

MSTB 254

Whether the 3D incompressible Euler or Navier-Stokes equations
can develop a finite time singularity from smooth initial data has been
an outstanding open problem. Here we review some existing computational
and theoretical work on possible finite blow-up of the 3D Euler equations.
We show that the local geometric properties of vortex filaments can lead
to dynamic depletion of vortex stretching, thus avoid finite time blowup
of the 3D Euler equations. Further, we perform large scale computations of
the 3D Euler equations to re-examine the two slightly perturbed anti-parallel
vortex tubes which is considered as one of the most attractive candidates
for finite time blowup of the 3D Euler equations. We found that there is
tremendous dynamic depletion of vortex stretching and the maximum vorticity
does not grow faster than double exponential in time. Finally, we present
a new class of solutions for the 3D Euler and Navier-Stokes equations,
which exhibit very interesting dynamic growth property. By exploiting
the special nonlinear structure of the equations, we can prove the global
regularity of this class of solutions.

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