# Members Seminar

## Modularity of Galois Representations

Chandrashekhar Khare
University of California, Los Angeles
November 22, 2010

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.

## Configuration Spaces of Hard Discs in a Box

Matthew Kahle
November 15, 2010

The "hard discs" model of matter has been studied intensely in statistical mechanics and theoretical chemistry for decades. From computer simulations it appears that there is a solid--liquid phase transition once the relative area of the discs is about 0.71, but little seems known mathematically. Indeed, Gian-Carlo Rota suggested that if we knew the total measure of the underlying configuration space, "we would know, for example, why water boils at 100 degrees on the basis of purely atomic calculations."

## Metaphors in Systolic Geometry

Larry Guth
University of Toronto; Institute for Advanced Study
October 18, 2010

The systolic inequality says that if we take any metric on an n-dimensional torus with volume 1, then we can find a non-contractible curve in the torus with length at most C(n). A remarkable feature of the inequality is how general it is: it holds for all metrics.

## Symplectic Homogenization

Claude Viterbo
Ecole Polytechnique; Institute for Advanced Study
October 11, 2010

Given a Hamiltonian on $T^n\times R^n$, we shall explain how the sequence of suitably rescaled (i.e. homogenized) Hamiltonians, converges, for a suitably defined symplectic metric. We shall then explain some applications, in particular to symplectic topology and invariant measures of dynamical systems.