For more information about the Seminar, to suggest speakers, or to volunteer to speak, contact Bahar Acu, Dave Bachman, Sam Nelson, Vin de Silva, or Helen Wong
| Date | Speaker | Title and Abstract |
| Tuesday
September 9 |
Organizational Meeting | |
| Tuesday
September 16 |
No Meeting | on hiatus
|
| Tuesday
September 23 |
No Meeting | on hiatus
|
| Tuesday
September 30 |
No Meeting | on hiatus
|
| Tuesday
October 7 |
No Meeting | on hiatus
|
| Tuesday
October 14 |
No Meeting | Fall Break |
| Tuesday
October 21 |
Puttipong Pongtanapaisan Pitzer College
|
Title: Special Positions of Shapes in Four-Dimensional Space
Abstract: I will begin by convincing you that four-dimensional space is more familiar than it might first appear. Then, I will introduce ways in which mathematicians study objects in 4-space. Each visualization method comes with its own advantages and limitations, as well as a natural measure of complexity that captures how "knotted" a shape can be. Drawing from my work on several projects, I will explain how these complexity measures connect to other areas of mathematics. For example, placing surfaces in what we call a rainbow position reveals connections to symplectic geometry. |
| Tuesday
October 28 |
No Meeting | on hiatus
|
| Tuesday
November 4 |
Robert Cass Claremont McKenna College
|
Title: Schubert varieties are splinters
Abstract: Schubert varieties are among the most well-studied singular algebraic varieties, and they have numerous applications in combinatorics and representation theory. In positive characteristic, Schubert varieties are known to be Frobenius split by the work of Mehta and Ramanathan. More recently, Bhatt showed that the full flag variety for GL_n is a derived splinter by entirely different methods. In this talk, we explain these concepts and we show how to generalize Bhatt's result to all Schubert varieties. Our methods apply equally well to affine Schubert varieties, which are of interest in number theory. This is joint work with Joao Lourenco. |
| Tuesday
November 11 |
No Meeting | on hiatus
|
| Tuesday
November 18 |
Chris Grossack UC Riverside
|
Title: Explicitly Computing Fukaya Categories of Surfaces
Abstract: Fukaya categories are rich and interesting invariants of symplectic manifolds that are often difficult to compute in practice. In the case of surfaces, however, the computation becomes pleasantly combinatorial, and can be carried out explicitly. In this expository talk we'll explain why one might care about Fukaya categories and how one can compute them explicitly enough for computer implementation using tools from "Noncommutative Mirror Symmetry". With any remaining time we'll explain the ideas behind the speaker's PhD thesis, which relies heavily on this machinery. |
| Tuesday
November 25 |
No Meeting | Thanksgiving Week |
| Tuesday
December 2 |
Indraneel Tambe UCLA
|
Title: Steinberg skein relations at roots of unity
Abstract: This talk discusses some of the relationships between skein theory and the representation theory of quantum sl2 when q is a root of unity. Specifically, I focus on the Frobenius pullback functor on Uq sl2 representations and see how this relates to Bonahon-Wong's Frobenius skein homomorphism between Kauffman bracket skein modules. I'll describe results from my joint work with Vijay Higgins in which we proved what we called Steinberg skein identities and used these in a new proof of the well-definition of the Frobenius skein homomorphism. |