There are many situations in geometry and group theory where it is natural, convenient or necessary to explore infinite groups via their actions on finite objects. But how much understanding can one really gain about an infinite group by examining its finite images? Sometimes little, sometimes a lot. In this colloquium talk, Bridson will sketch some of the rich history of this problem. Martin Bri...

Conditional Gradient Methods are an important class of methods to minimize smooth convex functions over polytopes. In this talk, Pokutta will give a broad overview of these methods and their applications and present some recent results both in traditional optimization and learning as well as in deep learning. Sebastian Pokutta is the Vice President of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and a Profess...

Tree decompositions are a powerful tool in structural graph theory that is traditionally used in the context of forbidden graph minors. Connecting tree decompositions and forbidden induced subgraphs has so far remained out of reach. Recently, several results in this direction have been obtained. The talk will be a survey of these results. Maria Chudnovsky received her PhD from Princeton Universi...

On 1 and 2 March 2021, the Berlin Mathematical School will host its first online BMS Days. On Tuesday, 2 March 2021 all events will be open to the MATH+ community. We are pleased to invite you to attend the following two talks: Gabriele Steidl (TU Berlin) – Motion and Deformation in Mathematical Imaging (11:00 am); Gaëtan Borot (HU Berlin) – Matrix models and counting surfaces: from combinatorics...

In this talk, Schwartz will explain the bounds proved by Halpern and Weaver and then show how to improve the lower bound. He will also explain an approach to getting the sharp bound, which amounts to approximating a paper Möbius band by certain kinds of finite tensegrities. Richard E. Schwartz got his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1991. He is currently the Chancellor Professor...

Large ensembles of points with Coulomb interactions arise in various settings of condensed matter physics, classical and quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, random matrices and even approximation theory, and they give rise to a variety of questions pertaining to analysis, partial differential equations and probability. Sylvia Serfaty is the Silver Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Ins...