Human-Made Climate Change: A Moral, Political, and Legal Issue
Observations of ongoing climate change, paleoclimate data, and climate simulations concur: human-made greenhouse gases have set Earth on a path to climate change with potentially dangerous consequences for humanity. James Hansen, climatologist and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, explains the urgency of the situation and discusses why he believes it is a moral issue that pits the rich and powerful against the young and unborn, against the defenseless, and against nature. He explores available options to avoid morally unacceptable consequences.
Perturbation Theory for Band Matrices
ANALYSIS/MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR
Implied Existence for 3-D Reeb Dynamics
Combinatorial Theorems in Random Sets
Modularity of Galois Representations
In this expository talk, I will outline a plausible story of how the study of congruences between modular forms of Serre and Swinnerton-Dyer, which was inspired by Ramanujan's celebrated congruences for his tau-function, led to the formulation of Serre's modularity conjecture. I will give some hints of the ideas used in its proof given in joint work with J-P. Wintenberger. I will end by pointing out just one of the many interesting obstructions to generalising the strategy of the proof to get modularity results in more general situations.
Counting Pattern Avoiding Permutations Via Integral Operators
The Permanents of Gaussian Matrices
In recent joint work with Alex Arkhipov, we proposed a quantum optics experiment, which would sample from a probability distribution that we believe cannot be sampled (even approximately) by any efficient classical algorithm, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. Several optics groups are already working toward doing our experiment.
(Some) Generic Properties of (Some) Infinite Groups
This talk will be a biased survey of recent work on various properties of elements of infinite groups, which can be shown to hold with high probability once the elements are sampled from a large enough subset of the group (examples of groups: linear groups over the integers, free groups, hyperbolic groups, mapping class groups, automorphism groups of free groups . . . )
Self-Correction, Distance Estimation and Local Testing of Codes
We construct linear codes of almost-linear length and linear distance that can be locally self-corrected on average from a constant number of queries:
1. Given oracle access to a word $w\in\Sigma^n$ that is at least $\varepsilon$-close to a codeword $c$, and an index $i\in [n]$ to correct, with high probability over $i$ and over the internal randomness, the local algorithm returns a list of possible corrections that contains $c_i$.