Since the mid 1990’s, the leading candidate for a unified theory of all fundamental physical interactions has been M Theory.

A full formulation of M Theory is still not available, and it is only understood through its limits in certain regimes, which are either one of five 10-dimensional string theories, or 11-dimensional supergravity. The equations for these theories are mathematically interesting in themselves, as they reflect, either directly or indirectly, the presence of supersymmetry. We discuss recent progresses and open problems about two of these theories, namely supersymmetric compactifications of the heterotic string and of 11-dimensional supergravity. This is based on joint work of the speaker with Sebastien Picard and Xiangwen Zhang, and with Teng Fei and Bin Guo.

Despite widespread interest in cryptographic multilinear maps since
Boneh-Silverberg's 2003 paper, very few candidate maps have been
discovered. The first serious candidate was a scheme of
Garg-Gentry-Halevi (GGH), which is based on ideal lattices in cyclotomic
number rings. While the scheme was later shown to be broken, the only
other candidate schemes are hardened variants of GGH. We give a
relatively detailed description of the GGH multilinear map.

We consider random products of SL(2, R) matrices that depend on a parameter in a non-uniformly hyperbolic regime. We show that if the dependence on the parameter is monotone then almost surely the random product has upper (limsup) Lyapunov exponent that is equal to the value prescribed by the Furstenberg Theorem (and hence positive) for all parameters, but the lower (liminf) Lyapunov exponent is equal to zero for a dense $G_\delta$ set of parameters of zero Hausdorff dimension. As a byproduct of our methods, we provide a purely geometrical proof of Spectral Anderson Localization for discrete Schrodinger operators with random potentials (including the Anderson-Bernoulli model) on a one dimensional lattice. This is a joint project with A.Gorodetski.