Open Neighborhood Seminar
Harvard University Math Department
Welcome to Open Neighborhood Seminar! ONS is a general-audience colloquium series for all members of the Harvard math community, including undergraduates at any level. It meets every other Wednesday at 4:30pm in SC507 for an hour-long talk, followed by snacks and a social hour with the speaker. (We alternate with Math Table.) You can subscribe to our mailing list here.
Next talk: February 15
- Speaker: Aaron Landesman (MIT)
- Title: Painleve VI: the search for canonical representations
- Abstract: In 1902, Painleve introduced a collection of 6 differential equations yielding all second order equations with no movable singularities. It turns out that algebraic solutions to Painleve's sixth equation correspond to canonical triples of 2 by 2 complex matrices. We will describe the history of what is known about these canonical tuples of matrices. These canonical tuples can also be viewed as canonical representations of fundamental groups of Riemann surfaces, and also as local systems on certain covers of the moduli space of curves. This talk includes joint work with Daniel Litt.
Past and future talks
February 1
- Speaker: Melanie Matchett Wood (Harvard)
- Title: Universality for groups
- Abstract: The Central Limit Theorem is an example of the ubiquitous yet still surprising phenomena in probability that many random inputs often combine to give an output insensitive to the input distributions. We will explore an example of how this plays out in the construction of random abelian groups from random integral matrices. As an example we will see the probability, as n goes to infinity, that a random linear map from Z^(n+1) to Z^n is surjective. (This talk includes joint work with Hoi Nguyen.)
February 15
- Speaker: Aaron Landesman (MIT)
- Title: Painleve VI: the search for canonical representations
- Abstract: In 1902, Painleve introduced a collection of 6 differential equations yielding all second order equations with no movable singularities. It turns out that algebraic solutions to Painleve's sixth equation correspond to canonical triples of 2 by 2 complex matrices. We will describe the history of what is known about these canonical tuples of matrices. These canonical tuples can also be viewed as canonical representations of fundamental groups of Riemann surfaces, and also as local systems on certain covers of the moduli space of curves. This talk includes joint work with Daniel Litt.
March 1
- Speaker: Elden Elmanto (Harvard)
- Title: TBA
- Abstract: TBA
March 22
- Speaker: Manon Revel (MIT)
- Title: TBA
- Abstract: TBA
April 5
- Speaker: Levent Alpoge (Harvard)
- Title: TBA
- Abstract: TBA
April 19
- Speaker: TBA (TBA)
- Title: TBA
- Abstract: TBA
Organizers: Ana Balibanu (ana@math.harvard.edu) and Dori Bejleri (bejleri@math.harvard.edu). Please drop us an email if you're curious about the seminar!