Scientific

So where exactly did algebra come from? Hint: they didn’t tell you the truth.

Speaker: 
Piers Bursill-Hall
Date: 
Thu, Mar 18, 2021
Location: 
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
Online
Abstract: 

The Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi is usually said to be the ‘father of algebra’, or otherwise that ‘the Arabs invented algebra’. There is probably nothing in the previous sentence that is true (except the ‘usually’). It turns out that the traditional story is just intellectually, mathematically, and culturally lazy. A little bit of thinking about the original texts, the mathematics, and a little bit of historical context leads to a much more problematic, culturally rich, and technically subtle story. We still don’t know the whole story – there is lots of room for further research, if you have the languages – and a lot of room for thinking about past mathematics (and by symmetry present day mathematics) as existing in a rich, complex social and intellectual matrix, and not just as a succession of correct theorems. The story might even involve the Sogdians, and you have never heard of them!​

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Reconsidering the History of Mathematics in India

Speaker: 
Clemency Montelle
Date: 
Thu, Mar 25, 2021
Location: 
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
Online
Abstract: 

Mathematics on the Indian subcontinent has been flourishing for over two and a half millennia, and this culture of inquiry has produced insights and techniques that are central to many of our mathematical practices today, such as the base ten decimal place value system and trigonometry. Indeed, many of their technical procedures, such as infinite series expansions for various mathematical relations predated those that were developed with the advent of the Calculus in Europe, but notably in contrasting intellectual circumstances with distinctly different epistemic priorities. However, while many histories of mathematics have centered on the so-called “western miracle” in their analysis of the ignition and flourishing of modern science, they have done so at the expense of other non-European traditions. This talk will highlight some of the significant mathematical achievements of India, and explore the work that remains to be done integrating them into more standard histories of mathematics.​

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Searching for the most likely evolution

Speaker: 
Giovanni Conforti
Date: 
Thu, Mar 25, 2021
Location: 
Zoom
Online
Conference: 
Kantorovich Initiative Seminar
Abstract: 

The theory of large deviations provides with a way to compute asymptotically the probability that an interacting particle system moves from a given configuration to another one over a fixed time interval. The problem of finding the most likely evolution realising the desired transition can be seen as a prototype of stochastic optimal transport problem, whose specific formulation depends on the choice of interaction mechanism. The first goal of this talk is to present some notable examples of this family of transport problems such as the Schrödinger problem and its mean field and kinetic counterparts. The second goal of the talk is to discuss some (possibly open) questions on the ergodic behaviour of optimal solutions and how their answer relies upon a combination of tools coming from Riemannian geometry, functional inequalities and stochastic control.

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Geometry, Logic, and Philosophy: The Case of the Parallels Postulate

Speaker: 
Patricia Blanchette
Date: 
Thu, Mar 18, 2021 to Fri, Mar 19, 2021
Location: 
Zoom
PIMS, University of Calgary
Conference: 
The Calgary Mathematics & Philosophy Lectures
Abstract: 

One of the most important techniques provided by modern logic is the use of models to show the consistency of theories. The technique burst onto the scene in the late 19th century, and had its most important early instance in demonstrating the consistency of non-Euclidean geometries. This talk investigates the development of that technique as it transitions from a geometric tool to an all-purpose tool of logic. I’ll argue that the standard narrative, according to which our modern technique provides answers to centuries-old questions, is mistaken. Once we understand how modern models work, I’ll argue, we see important differences between the kinds of consistencyclaims that would have made sense e.g. to Kant and the kinds of consistency-claims that we can demonstrate today. We’ll also see some philosophically-interesting shifts, over this time period, in the kinds of things that we take proofs to demonstrate.

Speaker

Patricia Blanchette is Professor of Philosophy and Glynn Family Honors Collegiate Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to coming to Notre Dame, Blanchette taught in the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. Blanchette works in the history and philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, history of analytic philosophy, and philosophy of language. She is an editor of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, and serves on the editorial boards of the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic and of Philosophia Mathematica. She is the author of Frege’s Conception of Logic (Oxford University Press 2012).

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Crystallography of hyperbolic lattices: from children's drawings to Fuchsian groups

Speaker: 
Igor Boettcher
Date: 
Wed, Mar 17, 2021
Location: 
Zoom
PIMS, University of Saskachewan
Conference: 
quanTA CRG Seminar
Abstract: 

yperbolic Lattices are tessellations of the hyperbolic plane
using, for instance, heptagons or octagons. They are relevant for quantum
error correcting codes and experimental simulations of quantum physics in
curved space. Underneath their perplexing beauty lies a hidden and,
perhaps, unexpected periodicity that allows us to identify the unit cell
and Bravais lattice for a given hyperbolic lattice. This paves the way for
applying powerful concepts from solid state physics and, potentially,
finding a generalization of Bloch's theorem to hyperbolic lattices. In my
talk, I will explain some of the mathematics underlying this hyperbolic
crystallography.

For other events in this series see the quanTA events website
.

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From hopping particles to Macdonald and Schubert polynomials

Speaker: 
Lauren K. Williams
Date: 
Thu, Mar 11, 2021
Location: 
Online
PIMS
Conference: 
PIMS Network Wide Colloquium
Abstract: 

he asymmetric exclusion process (ASEP) is a model of particles hopping on a one-dimensional lattice. While it was initially introduced by Macdonald-Gibbs-Pipkin to provide a model for translation in protein synthesis, the stationary distribution of the ASEP and its variants has surprising connections to combinatorics. I will explain how the study of the ASEP on a ring leads to new formulas for Macdonald polynomials, a remarkable family of multivariate polynomials which generalize Schur polynomials. In a different direction, the inhomogeneous ASEP on a ring is closely connected to Schubert polynomials, which represent classes of Schubert varieties in the flag variety. This talk is based on joint work with Corteel-Mandelshtam, and joint work with Donghyun Kim.

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The geometry of the spinning string

Speaker: 
Peter Kristel
Date: 
Wed, Mar 17, 2021
Location: 
Zoom
PIMS, University of Manitoba
Conference: 
Emergent Research: The PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar
Abstract: 

The development of quantum electrodynamics is one of the major achievements of theoretical physics and mathematics of the 20th century, called the "Jewel of physics" by Richard Feynman. This talk is not about that. Instead, I explain two of its basic ingredients - Feynman diagrams, and Spinor bundles - and then describe how these can be adapted to "electron-like" strings. This will lead us naturally to the Spinor bundle on loop space, which I will describe in some detail. An element of loop space, i.e. a smooth function from the circle into some fixed manifold, is supposed to represent a string at a fixed moment in time. I will then explain the notion of a fusion product (on this bundle), and argue that this is a manifestation of the principle of locality, which is ubiquitous in physics. If time permits, I will discuss some ongoing work, in collaboration with Matthias Ludewig, Darvin Mertsch, and Konrad Waldorf, where we describe how this fusive spinor bundle on loop space fits beautifully in the higher categorical framework of 2-vector bundles.

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Size-Ramsey numbers of powers of hypergraph trees and long subdivisions

Speaker: 
Liana Yepremyan
Date: 
Thu, Mar 11, 2021
Location: 
Zoom
PIMS, University of Victoria
Conference: 
PIMS-UVic Discrete Math Seminar
Abstract: 

The $s$-colour size-Ramsey number of a hypergraph $H$ is the minimum number of edges in a hypergraph $G$ whose every $s$-edge-colouring contains a monochromatic copy of $H$. We show that the $s$-colour size-Ramsey number of the $t$-power of the $r$-uniform tight path on $n$ vertices is linear in $n$, for every fixed $r, s, t$, thus answering a question of Dudek, La Fleur, Mubayi, and R\"odl (2017). In fact, we prove a stronger result that allows us to deduce that powers of bounded degree hypergraph trees and of `long subdivisions' of bounded degree hypergraphs have size-Ramsey numbers that are linear in the number of vertices. This extends recent results about the linearity of size-Ramsey numbers of powers of bounded degree trees and of long subdivisions of bounded degree graphs.

This is joint work with Shoham Letzter and Alexey Pokrovskiy.

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Mathematics, Colonization and Empire

Speaker: 
Tom Archibald, SFU
Date: 
Thu, Mar 4, 2021
Location: 
Online
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
PIMS, University of Victoria
Conference: 
PIMS-UVic Math Colloquium
Abstract: 

Mathematics has been an important tool in various colonizing enterprises; and in the last 2 centuries the colonizing enterprise has often involved teaching mathematics to the new subjects of the imperial or colonial regime. In this rather informal discussion we will look at mathematics and mathematicians as instruments in this process, using examples from various time periods and places.

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Fusion rings and their categorifications

Speaker: 
Andrew Schopieray
Date: 
Wed, Feb 24, 2021
Location: 
Zoom
PIMS, University of Alberta
Conference: 
Emergent Research: The PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar
Abstract: 

Fusion rings are a special class of associative unital rings with nonnegative integer structure constants and a notion of duality. For example, the group ring of a finite group is a fusion ring. We study fusion rings mainly because they arise as Grothendieck rings of categories associated to Hopf algebras, semisimple Lie algebras, vertex operator algebras, etc. In turn, these categories have application to topological quantum field theory, invariants of knots and links, and quantum computation, to name a few. In this talk we will discuss the brief history of the classification of categorifiable fusion rings and how number-theoretic properties of fusion rings dictate the existence of, or properties of, their categorifications.

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