Mathematics
Colloquia, Winter 2008
Talks are at 3:30 p.m. in South Hall, Room 6635
Colloquium Chair: Dave Morrison
A Graduate Colloquium designed exclusively for graduate students
meets on the remaining Thursdays at the same time and place.
There is also a list of Spring 2008 colloquia.
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Thursday
January 24, 2008
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Mike Hopkins
Harvard University
Title: Topological Field Theories
Abstract: The notion of a topological field theory has proved to be
an extraordinarily useful scheme for organizing and known invariants
of maniolds and for predicting the structure of new ones. In this
talk I'll explain the notion of
a topological field theory, and the way in which trying to classify them forces
topologists to re-examine some of the oldest assumptions in topology. I'll also
explain recent joint work with Jacob Lurie giving a complete
classification of topological field theories in (very) low dimensions.
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Thursday
March 6, 2008
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Susan Friedlander
University of Southern California
Title: The Ubiquity of Fluid Instability
Abstract: We argue that in some appropriate sense almost
all steady flows of an ideal fluid are unstable. However
there are different kinds of instability, some of which
could be called "slow" as opposed to "fast" instabilities
associated with isolated unstable eigenvalues. We will
discuss the behaviour of the Euler and Navier-Stokes
equations in the context of fluid instability.
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