Scientific

Mathematical biomedicine is an area of research where questions that arise in medicine are addressed by mathematical methods. Each such question needs first to be represented by a network with nodes that includes the biological entities that will be used to address the medical question. This network is then converted into a dynamical system for these entities, with parameters that need to be computed, or estimated. Simulations of the model are first used to validate the model, and then to address the specific question. I will give some examples, mostly from my recent work, including cancer drug resistance, side effects and metastasis, autoimmune diseases, and chronic and diabetic wounds, where the dynamical systems are PDEs. In each example, I will write explicitly the biological network, but will not the details of the corresponding PDE system.

An Azumaya algebra is something that is "locally" isomorphic to a matrix algebra. By varying the sense of "locally", we arrive at different incarnations of the concept. The motivating example is that of central simple algebras over a field. In this talk, I will concentrate on the topological aspects of the idea. I will give examples and show that the flexibility of topology allows one to produce counterexamples in algebra. At the end, I will mention some problems I do not know how to solve.

Peter Borewein empirically discovered quite a number of mysteries involving sign patterns of coefficients of polynomials of the form $f_{p,s,n}(q):=\prod_{j=0}^{n} \prod_{k=1}^{p-1} (1-q^{pj+k})^{s}$ ($p$ a prime and $s,n \in \mathbb{N}$). In the case $(p,s) \in \{(3,1), (3,2)\}$, he conjectured that the coefficients follow a repeating + - - pattern, and in the case $(p,s)=(5,1)$, it was conjectured that the coefficients follow a repeating + - - - - sign pattern. We consider a weaker problem of finding the signs of partial sums of coefficients along some arithmetic progressions. We use a combinatorial sieving principle by Li-Wan and elementary character theory to asymptotically estimate and find the signs of these partial sums. We find that the signs of these partial sums are compatible with the sign pattern in Borewein's conjectures. This is based on joint work with Ankush Goswami.

While mathematical models have classically been used in the study of physics and engineering, recently, they have become important tools in other fields such as biology, ecology, and sociology. In this talk I will discuss the use of partial differential equations and dynamical systems to shed light onto social and ecological phenomena. In the first part of this talk, we will focus on an Ecological application. For an efficient wildlife management plan, it is important that we understand (1) why animals move as they do and (2) what movement strategies are robust. I will discuss how reaction-advection-diffusion models can help us shed light into these two issues. The second part of the talk will focus on social applications. I will present a few models in the study of gentrification, urban crime, and protesting activity and discuss how theoretical and numerical analysis have provided intuition into these different social phenomena. Moreover, I will also point out the many benefits of utilizing a mathematical framework when data is not available.

Given an abelian variety A defined over a number field, a conjecture attributed to Serre states that the set of primes at which A admits ordinary reduction is of positive density. This conjecture had been proved for elliptic curves (Serre, 1977), abelian surfaces (Katz 1982, Sawin 2016) and certain higher dimensional abelian varieties (Pink 1983, Fite 2021, etc).

In this talk, we will discuss ideas behind these results and recent progress for abelian varieties with non-trivial endomorphisms, including the case where A has almost complex multiplication by an abelian CM field, based on joint work with Cantoral-Farfan, Mantovan, Pries, and Tang.

Apart from ordinary reduction, we will also discuss the set of primes at which an abelian variety admits basic reduction, generalizing a result of Elkies on the infinitude of supersingular primes for elliptic curves. This is joint work with Mantovan, Pries, and Tang.