Mathematics

The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) was founded in 1996, and Simon Fraser University is a founding member. The members of PIMS now include all the major Canadian research universities west of Ontario, as well as universities in Washington and Oregon. Please join us to celebrate 20 years of productive collaboration, with a lecture by SFU alumna and professor at UCL Nataša Pržulj on Data Driven Medicine followed by a reception.

We are faced with a flood of molecular and clinical data. Various biomolecules interact in a cell to perform biological function, forming large, complex systems. Large amounts of patient-specific datasets are available, providing complementary information on the same disease type. The challenge is how to model and mine these complex data systems to answer fundamental questions, gain new insight into diseases and improve therapeutics. Just as computational approaches for analyzing genetic sequence data have revolutionized biological and medical understanding, the expectation is that analyses of networked “omics” and clinical data will have similar ground-breaking impacts. However, dealing with these data is nontrivial, since many questions we ask about them fall into the category of computationally intractable problems, necessitating the development of heuristic methods for finding approximate solutions.

We develop methods for extracting new biomedical knowledge from the wiring patterns of large networked biomedical data, linking network wiring patterns with function and translating the information hidden in the wiring patterns into everyday language. We introduce a versatile data fusion (integration) framework that can effectively integrate somatic mutation data, molecular interactions and drug chemical data to address three key challenges in cancer research: stratification of patients into groups having different clinical outcomes, prediction of driver genes whose mutations trigger the onset and development of cancers, and re-purposing of drugs for treating particular cancer patient groups. Our new methods stem from network science approaches coupled with graph-regularised non-negative matrix tri-factorization, a machine learning technique for co-clustering heterogeneous datasets.

The connection between textiles and mathematics is intimate but not often explored, possibly because textiles and fiber arts have traditionally been the domain of women while mathematics was viewed as a male endeavour. How times have changed! Today, textiles and mathematics, like art and science, are recognized for their interwoven, complimentary attributes. In this presentation, mathematics professor Gerda de Vries will examine the connection between textiles and mathematics, in the context of both traditional and contemporary quilts. In a sense, every quilt is a mathematical object, by virtue of the fact that it has shape and dimension. But some quilts are more mathematical than others, and in very different ways. She will show how mathematical concepts such as symmetry, fractals, and algorithmic design show up in the world of quilting through serendipitous and intentional design.

This lecture is for a general audience. A background in mathematics is not needed, nor the ability to sew!

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Abstract

The Langlands program, initiated in the 1960s, is a set of conjectures predicting a unification of number theory and the representation theory of groups. More precisely, the Langlands correspondence provides a way to interpret results in number theory in terms of group theory, and vice versa.

In this talk we sketch a few aspects of the local Langlands correspondence using elementary examples. We then comment on some questions raised by the emerging "mod p" Langlands program.

Biography

Professor Ollivier works in the Langlands Programme, a central theme in pure mathematics which predicts deep connections between number theory and representation theory. She has made profound contributions in the new branches of the "p-adic" and "mod-p" Langlands correspondence that emerged from Fontaine's work on studying the p-adic Galois representation, and is one of the pioneers shaping this new field. The first results on the mod-p Langlands correspondence were limited to the group GL2(Qp); but Dr. Ollivier has proved that this is the only group for which this holds, a surprising result which has motivated much subsequent research.

She has also made important and technically challenging contributions in the area of representation theory of p-adic groups, in particular, in the study of the Iwahori-Hecke algebra. In joint work with P. Schneider, Professor Ollivier used methods of Bruhat-Tits theory to make substantial progress in understanding these algebras. She has obtained deep results of algebraic nature, recently defining a new invariant that may shed light on the special properties of the group GL2(Qp).

Rachel Ollivier received her PhD from University Paris Diderot (Paris 7), and then held a research position at ENS Paris. She subsequently was an assistant professor at the University of Versailles and then Columbia University, before joining the UBC Department of Mathematics in 2013.

Rachel is the recepient of the 2015 UBC Mathematics and Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences Faculty Award.

More information on this event is available on the event webpage

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