The Graduate Student Seminar is put on by the Mathematics Graduate Student Association . GSS meets approximately every other Monday.
All talks are at 4:15 in HH231 (Fall)/ HH229 (Spring) unless otherwise noted.
To volunteer to give a talk, or for anything else regarding the seminar, contact Megan Patnott.
Date | Speaker | Title |
---|---|---|
Monday, September 6 | Stephan Stolz | The Index Theorem and K-theory |
Monday, September 20 | Jeff Madsen | Elliptic Curves and Cryptography |
Monday, October 4 | Chris Porter | Extracting Randomness from the Tosses of a Biased Coin |
Monday, October 25 | Ryan Grady | Curvature and Physics |
Monday, November 8 | Xiaoyang Chen | Foliation structure on vector bundles |
Monday, November 22 | David Karapetyan | Triple Your Latexing Speed |
Monday, February 7 | Curtis Holliman | Solitons |
Monday, March 21 | Sarah Cotter | An Overview of the Surreal Numbers |
Monday, April 18 | Brandon Rowekamp | The Geometry of Planar Pixelations |
Monday, May 2 | Steven VanDenDriessche | Games, Determinacy, and Descriptive Set Theory |
The Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem is a celebrated result relating differential operators, topology and geometry. If D is a differential operator on a compact manifold, which is elliptic (a condition easy to check), then the kernel and cokernel of D are finite dimensional so that its index
index(D)=dim ker D - dim coker D
can be defined. The Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem gives a recipe for how to calculate index(D) in terms of algebraic topology, specifically in terms of a generalized cohomology theory called K-theory. Applied to a specific differential operator known as the Dirac operator, this can be used to show that some manifolds do not admit Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature.
More information, including installation materials and instructions for OS X users, can be found at http://davidkarapetyan.com/computing.php.
Though geared towards Mac users, much of the material in this talk is applicable to Linux and Windows users as well.