Norm Convergence of Nonconventional Ergodic Averages

Miguel Walsh
Buenos Aires
March 27, 2013

Consider a group of measure preserving transformations acting on a probability space. The limiting behavior of the nonconventional ergodic averages associated with this action has been the subject of much attention since the work of Furstenberg on Szemerédi’s theorem. We will discuss this problem, and how to establish the convergence of these averages whenever the group is nilpotent.

A Zero-Density Approach to Smooth Numbers

University of Montreal
March 27, 2013

A number is said to be $y$-smooth if all of its prime factors are less than $y$. Such numbers appear in many places throughout analytic and combinatorial number theory, and much work has been done to investigate their distribution.

Brown University
March 27, 2013

Statistics of the Zeros of the Zeta Function: Mesoscopic and Macroscopic Phenomena

University of California, Los Angeles
March 27, 2013

We review the well known microscopic correspondence between random zeros of the Riemann zeta-function and the eigenvalues of random matrices, and discuss evidence that this correspondence
extends to larger mesoscopic collections of zeros or eigenvalues. In addition, we discuss interesting phenomena that appears in the statistics of even larger macroscopic collections of zeros. The terms microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic are from random matrix theory and will be defined in the talk.

Dimers and Integrability

Richard Kenyon
Brown University
March 29, 2013

This is joint work with A. B. Goncharov. To any convex integer polygon we associate a Poisson variety, which is essentially the moduli space of connections on line bundles on (certain) bipartite graphs on a torus. There is an underlying integrable Hamiltonian system whose Hamiltonians are weighted sums of dimer covers.