The concept of supersymmetry, though never observed in Nature, has been one of the primary drivers of investigations in theoretical physics for several decades. Through all of this time, there have remained questions that are unsolved. This presentation will describe how looking at such questions one can be led to the 'Dodecaphony Technique' of Austrian composer Schoenberg.
Jim Gates is a theoretical physicist known for work on supersymmetry, supergravity and superstring theory. He is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, a University of Maryland Regents Professor and serves on President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Gates was nominated by the US Department of Energy to present his work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010. He is on the board of trustees of Society for Science & the Public, he was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT (2010-11) and was a Residential Scholar at MIT’s Simmons Hall. On February 1, 2013, Gates received the National Medal of Science.
N.B. Due to problems with the microphone, the audio quality of this video is significantly lower than expected.
It is well known that Einstein's general theory of relativity provides a geometrical description of gravity in terms of space-time curvature. Einstein's theory poses some fascinating and difficult mathematical challenges that have stimulated a great deal of research in geometry and partial differential equations. Important questions include the well-posedness of the evolution problem, the definition of mass and angular momentum, the formation of black holes, the cosmic censorship hypothesis, the linear and non-linear stability of black holes and boundary value problems at conformal infinity arising in the analysis of the AdS/CFT correspondence. I will give a non-technical survey of some significant advances and open problems pertaining to a number of these questions.
Constance van Eeden Invited Speaker, UBC Statistics Department
Abstract:
Tibshirani will review the lasso method and show an example of its utility in cancer diagnosis via mass spectometry. He will then consider testing the significance of the terms in a fitted regression, fit via the lasso. He will present a novel test statistic for this problem and show that it has a simple asymptotic null distribution. This work builds on the least angle regression approach for fitting the lasso, and the notion of degrees of freedom for adaptive models (Efron 1986) and for the lasso (Efron et. al 2004, Zou et al 2007). He will give examples of this procedure, discuss extensions to generalized linear models and the Cox model, and describe an R language package for its computation.
This work is joint with Richard Lockhart (Simon Fraser University), Jonathan Taylor (Stanford) and Ryan Tibshirani (Carnegie Mellon).
In many physical processes, one is interested in mixing and obstructions to mixing: warm air currents mixing with cold air; pollutant dispersal etc. Analogous questions arise in pure mathematics in dynamical systems and Markov chains. In this talk, I will describe the relationship between obstructions to mixing and eigenvectors of transition operators; in particular I will focus on recent work on the non-stationary case: when the Markov chain or dynamical system is non-homogeneous, or when the physical process is driven by external factors.
I will illustrate my talk with analysis of and data from ocean mixing.
In recent years it has become increasingly clear that stochasticity plays an important role in many biological processes. Examples include bistable genetic switches, noise enhanced robustness of oscillations, and fluctuation enhanced sensitivity or “stochastic focusing". Numerous cellular systems rely on spatial stochastic noise for robust performance. We examine the need for stochastic models, report on the state of the art of algorithms and software for modeling and simulation of stochastic biochemical systems, and identify some computational challenges.
The classification of finite simple groups is of fundamental importance in mathematics. It is also one of the longest and most complicated proofs in mathematics.
We will very briefly discuss the result and a bit of history and then explain how it can and has been used to solve problems in many areas. We will end with mentioning some specific and perhaps surprising consequences in various fields.