CCMS Colloquium: Puttipong Pongtanapaisan (Pitzer)
February 27 @ 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
CCMS Colloquium invites you to a talk by Puttipong Pongtanapaisan (Pitzer)
Title: Derivatives and the Shape of Graphs
Abstract: Reading the title of this talk, perhaps you think you are going to hear about Calculus I. I stole the title from a section of Stewart’s popular calculus book. But actually, I am going to talk about geometry and topology, and the root idea already appears in Calculus I. In real life, shapes such as proteins and DNA can be tangled up in space. These can be modeled as graphs embedded in three-dimensional space, and some applied mathematicians also call these networks. In calculus, you learn that information about derivatives, such as the number of local maxima and where they appear, tells us a great deal about the graph itself. I am going to apply this same philosophy to knotted graphs in three-dimensional space and demonstrate that one protein is more complexly entangled than another.
Bio: Puttipong Pongtanapaisan obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, where he studied low-dimensional topology under the supervision of Dr. Maggy Tomova. His previous positions include a PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan and a Postdoctoral Associate at Arizona State University. His research explores knotted shapes in confinement by analyzing the arrangement of local maxima and minima.
