Week of March 12, 2023

Mon Mar 13, 2023
10:30am - zoom - Probability and Analysis Webinar
Alexia Yavicoli - (UBC)
TBA

https://sites.google.com/view/paw-seminar

4:00pm to 5:00pm - RH 340N - Geometry and Topology
Aaron Mazel-Gee - (Caltech)
Towards knot homology for 3-manifolds

The Jones polynomial is an invariant of knots in $\mathbb{R}^3$. Following a proposal of Witten, it was extended to knots in 3-manifolds by Reshetikhin--Turaev using quantum groups.

 

Khovanov homology is a categorification of the Jones polynomial of a knot in $\mathbb{R}^3$, analogously to how ordinary homology is a categorification of the Euler characteristic of a space. It is a major open problem to extend Khovanov homology to knots in 3-manifolds.

 

In this talk, I will explain forthcoming work towards solving this problem, joint with Leon Liu, David Reutter, Catharina Stroppel, and Paul Wedrich. Roughly speaking, our contribution amounts to the first instance of a braiding on 2-representations of a categorified quantum group. More precisely, we construct a braided $(\infty,2)$-category that simultaneously incorporates all of Rouquier's braid group actions on Hecke categories in type A, articulating a novel compatibility among them.

4:00pm to 5:00pm - RH 306 - Applied and Computational Mathematics
Weiwei Hu - (University of Georgia)
Optimal Control Design for Fluid Mixing: from Open-Loop to Closed-Loop

The question of what velocity fields effectively enhance or prevent transport and mixing, or steer a scalar field to the desired distribution, is of great interest and fundamental importance to the fluid mechanics community. In this talk, we mainly discuss the problem of optimal mixing of an inhomogeneous distribution of a scalar field via active control of the flow velocity, governed by the Stokes or the Navier-Stokes equations. Specifically, we consider that the velocity field is steered by a control input that acts tangentially on the boundary of the domain through the Navier slip boundary conditions. This is motivated by mixing within a cavity or vessel by rotating or moving walls. Our main objective is to design a Navier slip boundary control for achieving optimal mixing. Non-dissipative scalars governed by the transport equation will be our main focus. In the absence of molecular diffusion, mixing is purely determined by the flow advection. This essentially leads to a nonlinear control and optimization problem.  A rigorous proof of the existence of optimal open-loop control and the first-order necessary conditions for optimality will be addressed. Moreover, a feedback law (sub-optimal) will be also constructed based on interpolation of the optimality conditions.  Finally, numerical experiments will be presented to demonstrate our ideas and control designs.

 

Tue Mar 14, 2023
1:00pm to 2:00pm - RH 440R - Dynamical Systems
Alex Luna - (UC Irvine)
Non-Stationary Hyperbolic Dynamics and Applications to Discrete Schrodinger Operators with Sturmian Potential

We begin by discussing a conjectured version of a non-stationary stable manifold theorem for a hyperbolic horseshoe and small perturbations of it, and discuss the techniques needed to achieve such a result. With these techniques in mind, we will conjecture a similar result for the trace maps on a particular family of cubic surfaces, and explain what deductions this result would make about the spectrum of related discrete Schrodinger operators with Sturmian potential.

Wed Mar 15, 2023
12:00pm to 1:00pm - RH306 (remote) - UCI Mathematics Alumni Lectures
Anna Konstorum - (Institute for Defense Analyses)
Decomposing a career: identifying the latent variables in data and in a career trajectory

In this talk, I will give a brief overview of my interdisciplinary career journey, in hopes of promoting and normalizing what may be deemed as an alternative path to applied mathematics. I’ll discuss some of my current research, which is focused on developing matrix- and tensor-decomposition methods for complex datasets, and will also introduce the audience to opportunities for mathematicians and computer scientists in government-sponsored research.

2:00pm to 3:00pm - RH 510 - Combinatorics and Probability
Andrew Suk - (UCSD)
On higher dimensional point sets in general position

An old question of Erdos asks: Given a set of $N$ points in $R^d$ with no $d+2$ members on a common hyperplane, what is the size of the largest subset of points in general position (i.e., no $d+1$ members on a hyperplane)?  In 2018, Balogh and Solymosi showed that one can use the hypergraph container method to tackle this problem in the plane.  In this talk, I will show how to use the container method to tackle Erdos' question in any dimension.  This is joint work with Ji Zeng.

Thu Mar 16, 2023
9:00am to 9:50am - Zoom - Inverse Problems
Luca Rondi - (Università di Pavia)
Full discretization and regularization for the Calderón problem

https://sites.uci.edu/inverse/

Fri Mar 17, 2023
1:00pm - DBH 1200 - Graduate Seminar
Hamid Hezari - canceled - (UC Irvine)
TBA