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Following a vaccine inoculation or disease exposure an immune response develops in time, where the description of its time evolution poses an interesting problem in dynamical systems. The principal goal of theoretical immunology is to construct models capable of describing long term immunological trends from the properties and interactions of its elementary components. In this talk I will give a brief description of the human immune system and introduce a simplified version of its elementary components. I will then discuss our contributions to the field achieved through my postdoctoral work with Dr. Jane Heffernan at York University. I will focus on our mechanistic modelling work describing vaccine-generated SARS-CoV-2 immunity and applications of our work towards understanding vaccination responses in people living with HIV. Finally, I will discuss our on-going work towards developing a machine learning public health platform capable of predicting immune response outcomes from repeated-dose immunological data.

A classical theorem of Birch and Merriman states that, for fixed 𝑛the set of integral binary 𝑛-ic forms with fixed nonzero discriminant breaks into finitely many GL2(ℤ)-orbits. In this talk, I’ll present several extensions of this finiteness result.

In joint work with Arul Shankar, we study a representation-theoretic generalization to ternary 𝑛-ic forms and prove analogous finiteness theorems for GL3(ℤ)-orbits with fixed nonzero discriminant. We also prove a similar result for a 27-dimensional representation associated with a family of 𝐾3surfaces.

In joint work with Sajadi, we take a geometric perspective and prove a finiteness theorem for Galois-invariant point configurations on arbitrary smooth curves with controlled reduction. This result unifies classical finiteness theorems of Birch–Merriman, Siegel, and Faltings.

Viral infections are social processes. Viral replication requires shared gene products that can be used by multiple viral genomes within the same cell, and hence act as public goods. This gives rise to viral cheats, a type of molecular parasite formed by large deletions, that spread by exploiting public goods encoded by full-length viruses. Cheats exist across the viral universe, arise frequently in laboratory infections, and reflect the emergence of evolutionary conflict at the molecular level. In this talk, I will explore two evolutionary consequences of viral cheating that play out at different timescales. Firstly, we will consider the evolution of multipartite viruses, in which the genome is fragmented, and each fragment must separately infect a host. This genome structure comes with clear costs, but has nevertheless evolved multiple times, and today accounts for nearly 40% of known plant viral species. Previous explanations for the evolution of multipartitism have focused on group benefits, but typically require unrealistic rates of coinfection, especially for multipartite viruses with more than two segments. We will argue that cheating provides a contrasting explanation. By combining evolutionary game theory models with agent-based simulations, we will show that the invasion of mutually complementing viral cheats can drive the evolution of multipartitism under far more permissive conditions, including transitions to highly multipartite viruses. This framework shows that multipartitism need not be a group-level adaptation, but can instead emerge as the evolutionary endpoint of the tragedy of the commons. Secondly, we will consider the evolution of cheat-driven extinction in viruses. Cheats emerge spontaneously in laboratory infections of almost all known viruses, driving drastic reductions in viral population sizes. As a result, virologists have long argued that viral infections may be ‘self-limiting’, a claim supported by recent discoveries of cheats in natural viral infections. However, it is unclear whether viral infections provide enough time for viral cheats to emerge, spread, and drive cooperator extinction. Here, we present a birth-death model that incorporates mutation, demographic noise, and a frequency-dependent selective advantage to cheating. We identify qualitatively different dynamical regimes and the timescales under which they lead to viral extinction. We further show that our model can produce characteristic signatures of selection, opening the door to evolutionary biomarkers for predicting the outcome of viral infections from sequencing data. This approach argues that cheating may not only be relevant over long evolutionary timescales, but may also shape viral dynamics in clinically relevant ways, analogous to the emergence of cancer in multicellular organisms.

A set {𝑎1,𝑎2,…,𝑎𝑚}of distinct positive integers is a Diophantine 𝑚-tuple if the product of any two distinct elements in the set is one less than a square. In this talk, I will discuss some recent results related to Diophantine tuples and their generalizations. Joint work with Ernie Croot, Seoyoung Kim, and Semin Yoo.

This talk will discuss two inference problems in dynamical systems, both motivated by applications in mathematical biology. First, we will discuss the classical gene regulatory network inference problem for time-stamped single-cell datasets and recent advances in optimal transport-based methods for this task. Second, if time permits, I will present an algorithm for bifurcation tracing, which aims to identify interfaces in parameter space. Applications to agent-based models and spatially extended reaction-diffusion equations will be demonstrated, both of which simulate Turing patterns commonly observed in animal skin, vegetation patterns, and more.

I will start with a survey on sums of random multiplicative functions, focusing on distributional questions and almost sure upper bounds and $\Omega$-results. In this context, I will describe previous work with Jake Chinis on a central limit theorem for correlations of Rademacher multiplicative functions, as well as ongoing work on establishing almost sure sharp bounds for them.

We will explore how a Fourier optimization framework may be used to study two classical problems in number theory involving Dirichlet characters: The problem of estimating the least character non-residue; and the problem of estimating the least prime in an arithmetic progression. In particular, we show how this Fourier framework leads to subtle, but conceptually interesting, improvements on the best current asymptotic bounds under the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, given by Lamzouri, Li, and Soundararajan. Based on joint work with Emanuel Carneiro, Micah Milinovich, and Antonio Ramos.

Individual and collective cell polarity has fascinated mathematical modelers for a long time. Recently, a more subtle type of symmetry breaking started to attract attention of experimentalists and theorists alike - emergence of chirality in single cells and in cell groups. I will describe a joint project with Bershadsky/Tee lab to understand collective cell chirality on adhesive islands. From the initial microscopy data, two potential models emerged: in one, cells elongate and slowly rotate, and neighboring cells align with each other. When the collective rotation is stopped by the island boundaries, chirality emerges. In an alternative model, cells become chiral due to stress fibers turns inside the cells on the boundary, and then the polarity pattern propagates inward into the cellular groups. We used agent-based modeling to simulate these two hypotheses. The models make many predictions, and I will show how we discriminated between the models by comparing the data to these predictions.

In 1770 Euler observed that $3^3 + 4^3 + 5^3 = 6^3$ and asked if there was another perfect power that equals the sum of consecutive cubes. This captivated the attention of many important mathematicians, such as Cunningham, Catalan, Genocchi and Lucas. In the last decade, the more general equation $x^k + (x+1)^k + \cdots + (x+d)^k = y^n$ began to be studied. In this talk we will focus on this equation. We will see some known results and one of the most used tools to attack this kind of problems. At the end we will show some new results that appear in arXiv:2404.03457.

We show that the reduction of a projective endomorphism modulo a discrete valuation naturally takes the form of a set-theoretic correspondence. This raises the possibility of classifying "reduction types" of such dynamical systems, reminiscent of the additive/multiplicative dichotomy for elliptic curves. These correspondences facilitate the exact evaluation of certain integrals of dynamical Green's functions, which arise as local factors in the context of counting rational points ordered by the Call-Silverman canonical height. No prior knowledge of arithmetic dynamics will be assumed.

In 1966, Tate proposed the Artin–Tate conjectures, which expresses special values of zeta function associated to surfaces over finite fields. Conditional on the Tate conjecture, Milne–Ramachandran formulated and proved similar conjectures for smooth proper schemes over finite fields. The formulation of these conjectures already relied on other unproven conjectures. In this talk, I will discuss an unconditional formulation and proof of these conjectures.

The Polya group P o ( K ) of a Galois number field K coincides with the subgroup of the ideal class group C l ( K ) of K consisting of all strongly ambiguous ideal classes. We prove that there are only finitely many imaginary abelian number fields K whose "Polya index" [ C l ( K ) : P o ( K ) ] is a fixed integer. Accordingly, under GRH, we completely classify all imaginary quadratic fields with the Polya indices 1 and 2. Also, we unconditionally classify all imaginary biquadratic and imaginary tri-quadratic fields with the Polya index 1. In another direction, we classify all real quadratic fields K of extended R-D type (with possibly only one more field K ) for which P o ( K ) = C l ( K ) . Our result generalizes Kazuhiro's classification of all real quadratic fields of narrow R-D type whose narrow genus numbers are equal to their narrow class numbers.

This is a joint work with Amir Akbary (University of Lethbridge).

I will discuss a result with Bonatti and Crovisier from 2009 showing that the C^1 generic diffeomorphism f of a closed manifold has trivial centralizer; i.e. fg = gf implies that g is a power of f. I’ll discuss features of the C^1 topology that enable our proof (the analogous statement is open in general in the C^r topology, for r>1). I’ll also discuss some features of the proof and some recent work, joint with Danijela Damjanovic and Disheng Xu that attempts to tackle the non-generic case.

Let $d>k$ be positive integers. Motivated by an earlier result of Bugeaud and Nguyen, we let $E_{k,d}$ be the set of $(c_1,\ldots,c_k)\in\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}^k$ such that $\vert\alpha_0\vert\vert\alpha_1\vert^{c_1}\cdots\vert\alpha_k\vert^{c_k}\geq 1$ for any algebraic integer $\alpha$ of degree $d$, where we label its Galois conjugates as $\alpha_0,\ldots,\alpha_{d-1}$ with $\vert\alpha_0\vert\geq \vert\alpha_1\vert\geq\cdots \geq \vert\alpha_{d-1}\vert$. First, we give an explicit description of $E_{k,d}$ as a polytope with $2^k$ vertices. Then we prove that for $d>3k$, for every $(c_1,\ldots,c_k)\in E_{k,d}$ and for every $\alpha$ that is not a root of unity, the strict inequality $\vert\alpha_0\vert\vert\alpha_1\vert^{c_1}\cdots\vert\alpha_k\vert^{c_k}>1$ holds. We also provide a quantitative version of this inequality in terms of $d$ and the height of the minimal polynomial of $\alpha$.