• Topology Seminar: Mauricio Gomez Lopez (U. Oregon)

    Title: Cobordism Categories and Spaces of Manifolds. Abstract: Cobordisms have been one of the central objects in topology since the pioneering work of Rene Thom, which provided the first link between manifolds and homotopy theory. In more recent years, there has been much focus on cobordism categories. These play a fundamental role in the study […]

  • Formal geometry and characteristic classes

    I plan to explain how a purely algebraic technique involving Lie Algebra Cohomology can be used to construct standard characteristic classes of vector bundles and foliations (in fact, it could be tweaked to give most characteristic classes in differential and complex geometry).

  • Magnitude meets persistence. What happens after?

    Argue Auditorium, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    The magnitude is an isometric invariant of metric spaces that was introduced by Tom Leinster in 2010, and is currently the object of intense research, as it has been shown to encode many invariants of a metric space such as volume, dimension, and capacity. When studying a metric space in topological data analysis using persistent […]

  • Faster point counting for curves over prime power rings (Maurice Rojas, Texas A&M)

    Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

    Counting points on algebraic curves over finite fields has numerous applications in communications and cryptology, and has led to some of the most beautiful results in 20th century arithmetic geometry. A natural generalization […]

  • Calculus, Real Fewnomials, and P vs NP

    Argue Auditorium, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    We review a beautiful 17th century result by the philosopher Rene Descartes: a univariate real polynomial with t monomial terms has no more than t-1 positive roots. We then see how one can prove a generalization that counts roots of two bivariate polynomials (with few monomial terms), using nothing more than basic calculus. In other […]