PIMS Network Wide Colloquium | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

In 2021, PIMS inaugurated a high-level network-wide colloquium series. For this series, distinguished speakers give talks across the full PIMS network with one talk per month during the academic term.

These seminars will be available online. Please see our notes on effective virtual events for tips on getting the most out of our online events. The seminars will be recorded, and the recordings will be available on mathtube.org.

Past Events

We will introduce the research area of complex dynamics by studying the family of (complex) quadratic polynomials, $z->z^2+c$. Historically, mathematicians first studied the dynamics of {\em real} quadratic polynomials and then moved to the complex...

We consider metric tensors on undirected weighted graphs G, which allows us to treat P(G), the set of probability vectors on G, as a length space. On defines a divergence operator div_\mu(G) for mu in P(G), in such a way that we can use control...

Learning with Errors (LWE) is a hard math problem with algebraic structure, underpinning many proposed Post-Quantum Cryptosystems (PQC). The only PQC key exchange standardized by NIST is based on module LWE, and current publicly available PQC...

Euler’s famous formula tells us that (with appropriate caveats), a map on the sphere with f countries (faces), e borders (edges), and v border-ends (vertices) will satisfy v-e+f=2. And more generally, for a map on a surface with g holes, v-e+f=2-2g...

The classical obstacle problem consists of finding the equilibrium position of an elastic membrane whose boundary is held fixed and which is constrained to lie above a given obstacle. By classical results of Caffarelli, the free boundary is smooth...

The past twenty-five years have heralded an unparalleled increase in understanding of cancer. At the same time, mathematical modelling has emerged as a natural tool for unravelling the complex processes that contribute to the initiation and...

Resolving a conjecture of Erdos and Turan from the 1930's, in the 1970's Szemeredi showed that a set of integers with positive upper density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Soon thereafter, Furstenberg used Ergodic Theory to gave a...

The Riemann zeta function plays a central role in our understanding of the prime numbers. In this talk we will review some of its amazing properties as well as properties of other similar functions, the Dirichlet L-functions. We will then see how the...

Speaker Biography: Holly Krieger is a leader in the area of arithmetic dynamics. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was a postdoc at MIT before starting her present position in Cambridge. She was the Australian...

Mathematics can help Art Historians and Art Conservators in studying and understanding art works, their manufacture process and their state of conservation. The presentation will review several instances of such collaborations, explaining the role of...