Scientific

Let \(p\) be an odd prime. We study Mazur's conjecture on the growth of the Mordell--Weil ranks of an elliptic curve \(E/\mathbb{Q}\) over an imaginary quadratic field in which \(p\) splits and \(E\) has good reduction at \(p\). In particular, we obtain criteria that may be checked through explicit calculation, thus allowing for the verification of Mazur's conjecture in specific examples. This is joint work with Rylan Gajek-Leonard, Jeffrey Hatley, and Antonio Lei.

The Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance quantifies dissimilarity between metric measure (mm) spaces and provides a natural alignment between them. As such, it serves as a figure of merit for applications involving alignment of heterogeneous datasets, including object matching, single-cell genomics, and matching language models. While various heuristic methods for approximately evaluating the GW distance from data have been developed, formal guarantees for such approaches—both statistical and computational—remained elusive. This work closes these gaps for the quadratic GW distance between Euclidean mm spaces of different dimensions. At the core of our proofs is a novel dual representation of the GW problem as an infimum of certain optimal transportation problems. The dual form enables deriving, for the first time, sharp empirical convergence rates for the GW distance by providing matching upper and lower bounds. For computational tractability, we consider the entropically regularized GW distance. We derive bounds on the entropic approximation gap, establish sufficient conditions for convexity of the objective, and devise efficient algorithms with global convergence guarantees. These advancements facilitate principled estimation and inference methods for GW alignment problems, that are efficiently computable via the said algorithms.

It is conjectured that there is no projective plane of order 12. Balanced splittable Hadamard matrices were introduced in 2018. In 2023, it was shown that a projective plane of order 12 is equivalent to a balanced multi-splittable Hadamard matrix of order 144. There will be an attempt to show the equivalence in a way that may require little background.

Let $s(n)$ denote the sum of proper divisors of a positive integer $n$. In 1992, Erdös, Granville, Pomerance, and Spiro conjectured that if \(\square\) is a set of integers with asymptotic density zero then the preimage set \(s^{−1}(\square)\) also has asymptotic density zero. In this talk, we will discuss the verification of this conjecture when \(\square\) is the set of integers with missing digits (also known as ellipsephic integers) by giving a quantitative estimate on the size of the set \(s^{-1}(\square)\). This talk is based on the joint work with Giulia Cesana, C\'{e}cile Dartyge, Charlotte Dombrowsky and Lola Thompson.

Exponential sums play a role in many different problems in number theory. For instance, Gauss sums are at the heart of some early proofs of the quadratic reciprocity law, while Kloosterman sums are involved in the study of modular and automorphic forms. Another example of application of exponential sums is the circle method, an analytic approach to problems involving the enumeration of integer solutions to certain equations. In many cases, obtaining upper bounds on the modulus of these sums allow us to draw conclusions, but once the modulus has been bounded, it is natural to ask the question of the distribution of exponential sums in the region of the complex plane in which they live. After a brief overview of the motivations mentioned above, I will present some results obtained with Emmanuel Kowalski on the equidistribution of exponential sums indexed by the roots modulo p of a polynomial with integer coefficients.