Geometry/Topology Seminar

3:30 - 4:30pm Tuesdays
425 Hill

Please contact Steve Ferry, Konstantin Mischaikow, or Xiaochun Rong if you would like to speak or suggest a speaker.
 
 

Seminar Schedule --- Spring, 2012

(Please scroll down for abstracts.)


Date
Speaker
Title
Jan. 17
Vidit Nanda (Rutgers)
The category of a Morse function
Jan. 24
Vin de Silva (Pomona)
The zigzag persistence of spaces fibered over the real line
Jan. 31
Shaun Harker (Rutgers)
Computing the Induced Map on Homology
Feb. 7
Pablo Pelaez (Rutgers)
Obstructions for the existence of embeddings of algebraic varieties
Feb. 14
Steve Ferry (Rutgers)
Simple homotopy theory
Feb. 17
2:15-3:30 room 705
Joan Licata (IAS)
Legendrian knot invariants in Seifert fibered spaces
Feb. 21
No speaker
No seminar
Feb. 28
Marian Gidea (IAS)
Geometry of Weak Stability Boundaries
Mar. 6
Steve Ferry (Rutgers)
Formal Deformations
Mar. 13
No Talk
Spring Recess
Mar. 20
No speaker
No seminar
Mar. 27
Marian Mrozek (Jagiellonian University)
Towards the understanding of the homological persistence of maps.
(joint with Herbert Edelsbrunner)
Apr. 3
Tomas Gedeon, Montana State U
Structure of the afferent terminals in terminal ganglion of a cricket and persistent homology
Apr. 10
Bob Williams
(U of Texas and IAS)
Two themes from 2-dimensional tilings: the balanced pair algorithm and asymptotic structure
Apr. 17
Vidit Nanda (Rutgers)

Recovering continuous functions up to homology from dense samples

Apr. 20
Xianzhe Dai (Santa Barbara)

The asymptotic expansion of Bergman kernel for orbifolds
(joint with complex geometry seminar, 10:30-11:30)

Apr. 24

Dave Richeson
(Dickenson College)

Obtaining entropy bounds for nonhyperbolic dynamical systems via symbolic dynamics


Schedule with abstracts


Date
Speaker
Title
Abstract
Jan. 17
TBA
The category of a Morse function
We will discuss a theorem of Cohen-Jones-Segal that explains how to reconstruct the homotopy type of a manifold from a Morse function on that manifold.
Jan. 24
Vin de Silva (Pomona)
The zigzag persistence of spaces fibered over the real line
The publication of the persistence algorithm by Edelsbrunner, Letscher and Zomorodian (2000) was one of the decisive breakthroughs in the field of applied topology. It instantly made it possible to define and efficiently compute robust topological invariants of a statistical data set. The first step is to represent the data set by a nested family of simplicial complexes: the smallest being just the point set itself, the largest being a contractible blob, with the intermediate complexes carrying topological information at different scales. The homology of this family of complexes is described by a "barcode" or "persistence diagram", the length of each bar indicating the range of of scales over which a particular feature is in evidence.

Two very subtle variations are the "extended persistence" of Cohen-Steiner, Edelsbrunner and Harer, and the "interval persistence" of Dey and Wenger. In different ways, these attempt to capture the changing topology of a family of spaces parametrised by the real line. For a long time, I found both of these constructions to be rather mysterious. Eventually, in collaboration with Carlsson and Morozov, we were able to understand their effectiveness in terms of a new theory called zigzag persistence. This is a generalisation of persistence which is powered by Gabriel's theory of "quiver" representations.

I will describe all of this as I currently understand it.
Jan. 31
Shaun Harker
Computing the Induced Map on Homology
Conley Index theory provides information about the structure of invariant sets of a dynamical system. In particular, it is a shift equivalence class of an induced map on homology. We are interested in computing Conley Index, and hence induced map on homology. We show how under our usual assumptions the Vietoris-Begle theorem gives a straightforward method of accomplishing this by computing the homology of a relative graph complex furnished by a map on a relative pair. However, the computational space requirements for such an approach might not be acceptable. We present an algorithm (which actually furnishes a constructive proof of the Vietoris-Begle theorem in our setting) that manages to have lower space requirements by handling the graph complex in a fiber-wise manner. We also discuss the possibility of using Discrete Morse Theory techniques in order to speed up the necessary computation on the fibers.
Feb. 7
Pablo Pelaez
Obstructions for the existence of embeddings of algebraic varieties
The purpose of this talk is to produce obstructions in the Morel-Voevodsky motivic homotopy category for the existence of embeddings of algebraic varieties.
Feb. 14
Steve Ferry
Simple homotopy theory
This will be a gentle introduction to simple homotopy theory.
Feb. 17
Joan Licata
Legendrian knot invariants in Seifert fibered spaces
Knot theory beyond the three-sphere has seen increased attention in recent years, and in this talk I'll focus on knot theory in Seifert fibered spaces. In particular, we'll consider Legendrian knots in Seifert fibered spaces equipped with a special contact form. This setting gives rise to both topological and contact geometric questions, and I'll describe some of the ingredients used to prove the Legendrian non-simplicity of an infinite family of knot types representing torsion homology classes. This is joint work with J. Sabloff.
Feb. 21
No speaker
No seminar
Feb. 28
Marian Gidea
Geometry of Weak Stability Boundaries
The notion of a weak stability boundary has been successfully applied to design low energy trajectories from the Earth to the Moon. The structure of this boundary has been investigated in a number of studies, where partial results have been obtained. We propose a generalization of the weak stability boundary. In the context of the planar circular restricted three-body problem, under certain conditions on the mass ratio of the primaries and on the energy, we prove analytically that the weak stability boundary about the heavier primary coincides with a branch of the stable manifold of the Lyapunov orbit about one of the Lagrange points. Under more general conditions, we give a semi-numerical argument that the weak stability boundary about the lighter primary consists of points that lie on the stable manifolds of the Lyapunov orbits about two of the Lagrange points.
Mar. 6
Steve Ferry (Rutgers)
Formal Deformations
CTC Wall has written an 11 page introduction to simple-homotopy theory called "Formal Deformations" that contains lemmas that may be useful for computational algebraic topology. We will be going over this paper.
Mar. 13
No speaker
No talk
Spring break
Mar. 20
No speaker
No talk
No seminar
Mar. 27
Marian Mrozek (Jagiellonian University)
Towards the understanding of the homological persistence of maps
Assume that f: X -> Y is a Lipschitz continuous function between compact Riemannian submanifolds of Euclidean space. Instead of precise knowledge X and Y, we are only given point sets P and Q sampled uniformly from X and Y respectively. Instead of precise knowledge of the images f(P), we can only assign to each p in P some point F(p) "near" f(p) in Y but we do not require that F(p) lie in the sample Q. We provide precise conditions under which knowledge of P, F(P) and Q suffices - with high confidence - to reconstruct the map f_*:H_*(X) -> H_*(Y) induced by f on the homology groups of X and Y. If time permits, we will also show that this reconstruction is robust to bounded sampling noise.
Apr. 3
Tomas Gedeon, Montana State U
Structure of the afferent terminals in terminal ganglion of a cricket and persistent homology
TBA
Apr. 10
Bob Williams
(U of Texas and IAS)

Two themes from 2-dimensional tilings: the balanced pair algorithm and asymptotic structure
TBA
Apr. 17

Vidit Nanda

Recovering continuous functions up to homology from dense samples

Assume that f: X -> Y is a Lipschitz continuous function between compact Riemannian submanifolds of Euclidean space. Instead of precise knowledge X and Y, we are only given point sets P and Q sampled uniformly from X and Y respectively. Instead of precise knowledge of the images f(P), we can only assign to each p in P some point F(p) "near" f(p) in Y but we do not require that F(p) lie in the sample Q. We provide precise conditions under which knowledge of P, F(P) and Q suffices - with high confidence - to reconstruct the map f_*:H_*(X) -> H_*(Y) induced by f on the homology groups of X and Y. If time permits, we will also show that this reconstruction is robust to bounded sampling noise.

Apr. 20

Xianzhe Dai
(Santa Barbara)

The asymptotic expansion of Bergman kernel for orbifolds

The Bergman kernel in the context of several complex
variableshas long been an important subject. Its analogue for complex projective
manifolds is studied by Tian, Zelditch, Catlin, Lu among others,establishing the
diagonal asymptotic expansion for high powers of an ample line bundle.
Moreover, the coefficients in the asymptotic expansion encode geometric
information of the underlying complex projective manifolds. This
asymptotic expansion plays a crucial role in the breakthrough work of Donaldson where the existence of K\"ahler metrics with constant scalar curvature is
shown to be closely related to Chow-Mumford stability.


There are work extending the asymptotic expansion of Bergman kernel to
orbifolds, such asthose of Dai-Liu-Ma and Song. However, an analog of Donaldson's
theorem remained elusiveuntil the recent work of Ross-Thomas who introduced a weighted Bergmankernel on K\"ahlerorbifolds with cyclic quotient singularities. We will explain how the work of Dai-Liu-Ma can be used to directly derive an asymptotic expansion for weighted Bergman kernel which plays an important role
in proving an orbifold version of Donaldson's theorem.

Apr. 24
Dave Richeson (Dickenson College)
Obtaining entropy bounds for nonhyperbolic dynamical systems via symbolic dynamics
We introduce index systems, a tool for studying isolated invariant sets of dynamical systems that are not necessarily hyperbolic. Every continuous dynamical system satisfying a weak form of expansiveness possesses an index system. The mapping of the index system mimics the expansion and contraction of hyperbolic maps on the tangent space and they may be used like Markov partitions to generate symbolic dynamics. However, because the elements of an index system may have nontrivial intersections, itineraries are not necessarily unique. Thus we discuss how to obtain entropy bounds from symbolic dynamics generated from partitions with overlapping elements.

Homepage: To maintainer's homepage.
Rutgers: Up to the math department webpage.