We will discuss the notion of loops in linguistic structures, mainly in dictionaries. In a simplified view, a dictionary is a graph that links every word (vertex) to a set of alternative words (the definition) which in turn point to further descendants. Iterating through definitions, one may loop back to the original word. We will examine possible links between such definitional loops and the emergence of new concepts during the evolution of languages. Potential relation to living systems will be briefly discussed.

We will present joint work with Will Merry. Using spectral invariants in Rabinowitz Floer homology we present an abstract contact non-squeezing theorem for periodic contact manifolds. We then exemplify this in concrete examples. Finally we explain connections to the existence of a biinvariant metric on contactomorphism groups. All this is connected and generalizes work by Eliashberg-Polterovich and Sandon.

We will discuss recent work on wave evolutions for large data. Particular emphasis will be placed on concentration compactness ideas. Amongst others, we will describe a result for wave equations from R^3 minus the unit ball into the sphere S^3 where we can show that any solution approaches the unique harmonic map in its degree class.
Joint work with Cote, Kenig, Lawrie, Nakanishi -- in various combinations.

This is the second of two talks in which the speaker will discuss the development of the theory of Toeplitz matrices and determinants in response to questions arising in the analysis of the Ising model of statistical mechanics. The first talk will be largely historical and the second will describe the state of the art today, including recent results of the speaker and his colleagues Alexander Its and Igor Krasovsky.

We develop a simple geometric variant of the Kabatiansky-Levenshtein approach to proving sphere packing density bounds. This variant gives a small improvement to the best bounds known in Euclidean space (from 1978) and an exponential improvement in hyperbolic space. Furthermore, we show how to achieve the same results via the Cohn-Elkies linear programming bounds, and we formulate a few problems in harmonic analysis that could lead to even better bounds. This is joint work with Yufei Zhao.

Several examples of Hamiltonian evolution equations for systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom are presented. It is sketched how these equations can be derived from some underlying quantum dynamics ("mean-field limit") and what kind of physics they describe.