Author
John Jumper BS Math ’07 wins Nobel Prize
Jul. 16, 2025—John Jumper, who received a BS degree in Mathematics and Physics from Vanderbilt in 2007, has won a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Jumper works as American Director at Google DeepMind Technologies. His team created the AI model AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures from their amino acid sequence. About his work Jumper...
Shanks Lecture: May 19-22, 2025
Mar. 10, 2025—May 19-22, 2025, with Shanks Lecturer Doron Lubinsky Constructing Functions 2025 Celebrating Ed Saff’s 80th birthday Conference Website
Topology and Group Theory Seminar: April 16, 2025
Mar. 9, 2025—Speaker: Robbie Lyman (Rutgers) Title: Graphical models for groups Abstract: In geometric group theory, we love groups and graphs. Every (abstract) group has (many) Cayley graphs, each one associated with a choice of a generating set. Recently I’ve been curious about topological groups, inspired by the budding theory around and community of people inspired by mapping class...
Topology and Group Theory Seminar: April 9, 2025
Mar. 9, 2025—Speaker: John Ratcliffe (Vanderbilt) Title: The G-index of a spin closed hyperbolic 4-manifold M Abstract: In this talk, we will show how to compute the G-index of a spin closed hyperbolic 4-manifold M for a group G of symmetries of a spin structure on M. As an example, we will compute the G-index for the group G of symmetries of the fully symmetric spin structure on...
Colloquium – Talk by Ronnie Pavlov: April 2, 2025
Mar. 8, 2025—April 2, 2025 (Wednesday), 4:10 pm Ronnie Pavlov, University of Denver Title: “Complexity in symbolic dynamical systems” There are various ways in which one can describe the simplicity/complexity of a dynamical system. One is in terms of qualitative dynamical properties, such as periodicity/equicontinuity (simple) or mixing/independence (complex). For symbolically defined dynamical systems called subshifts, there is...
Topology and Group Theory Seminar: April 2, 2025
Mar. 8, 2025—Speaker: Talia Fernos (Vanderbilt) Title: Lattice envelopes and groups acting AU-acylindrically on products of hyperbolic spaces Abstract: In this joint work with Balasubramanya, we explore the capacity for a group acting AU-acylindrically on a finite product of delta-hyperbolic spaces to satisfy three properties introduced by Bader, Furman, and Sauer. When satisfied, these properties restrict the potential ambient group...
Topology and Group Theory Seminar: March 26, 2025
Mar. 7, 2025—Speaker: Caglar Uyanik (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Title: TBA Abstract: TBA Host: Spencer Dowdall
Colloquium – Talk by Steve Trettel: March 20, 2025
Mar. 6, 2025—March 26, 2025 (Wednesday), 4:10 pm Steve Trettel, University of San Francisco What do 3-manifolds Look Like? Thurston’s Geometrization Theorem, later proved by Perelman, describes 3-manifolds in terms of geometric building blocks. Each manifold decomposes into pieces modeled on one of just eight homogeneous 3-dimensional spaces, known as the Thurston geometries. In this talk, we...
Topology and Group Theory Seminar: March 19, 2025
Mar. 6, 2025—Speaker: Oishee Banerjee (Florida State University) Title: TBA Abstract: TBA Host: Dan Margalit
Topology and Group Theory Seminar: March 5, 2025
Mar. 5, 2025—Speaker: Madeline Brandt (Vanderbilt) Title: TBA Abstract: TBA