Physics

Although integers are ubiquitous in quantum physics, they have different mathematical origins. In this colloquium, I will give a glimpse of how integers arise as either topological invariants or as analytic indices, as is the case in the so-called quantum Hall effect. I will explain the difficulties arising in extending well-known arguments when one relaxes the approximation that the particles effectively do not interact with each other in matter. Recent advances have made such realistic generalizations possible.

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.

• http://www.kaleidoscope.net/greg/math/The%20Adinkramat.html
• https://code.google.com/p/adinkramat/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFvtSGCFVO0

Richard Montgomery, University of California, Santa Cruz will deliver a talk entitled, "An Octahedral Gem Hidden in Newton's Three Body Problem." The lecture will take place on July 25, 2012 at the Fields Institute, as part of the conference on "Geometry, Symmetry, Dynamics, and Control: The Legacy of Jerry Marsden." Richard Montgomery received undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and physics from Sonoma State in Northern California. He completed his PhD under Jerry Marsden at Berkeley in 1986, after which he held a Moore Instructorship at MIT for two years, followed by two years of postdoctoral studies at University of California, Berkeley. Montgomery's research fields are geometric mechanics, celestial mechanics, control theory and differential geometry and is perhaps best known for his rediscovery - with Alain Chenciner - of Cris Moore's figure eight solution to the three-body problem, which led to numerous new 'choreography' solutions. He also established the existence of the first-known abnormal minimizer in sub-Riemannian geometry, and is known for investigations using gauge-theoretic ideas of how a falling cat lands on its feet. He has written one book on sub-Riemannian geometry. The PIMS Marsden Memorial Lecture Series is dedicated to the memory of Jerrold E Marsden (1942-2010), a world-renowned Canadian applied mathematician. Marsden was the Carl F Braun Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech, and prior to that he was at the University of California, Berkeley, for many years. He did extensive research in the areas of geometric mechanics, dynamical systems and control theory. He was one of the original founders in the early 1970s of reduction theory for mechanical systems with symmetry, which remains an active and much studied area of research today. The inaugural Marsden Memorial Lecture was given by Alan Weinstein (University of California, Berkeley) in July of 2011 at ICIAM in Vancouver.