Seven workshops and three distinguished lectures are planned for spring, as well as two summer schools

The Brin Mathematics Research Center (Brin MRC) entered its second year with two very successful summer schools. First, we held a two-week school on Partial Hyperbolicity following the spring Partial Hyperbolicity workshop. This summer school was organized by Dima Dolgopyat, Federico Rodriguez Hertz (Penn State) and Amie Wilkinson (University of Chicago). The second summer school was a one-week school on Fluid Dynamics organized by Huy Nguyen and Hussain Ibdah. Each summer school had close to 40 participants that were chosen from over 100 applicants. 

The fall semester welcomed participants in four workshops. The first Fall workshop was on “Polylogarithms, Cluster Algebras, and Scattering Amplitudes.” This workshop was organized by Christian Zickert, two of his former students Dani Kaufman (now at Copenhagen University) and Zack Greenberg (Heidelberg University), and Hebert Gangl (Durham University/MPIM Bohn). This workshop explored the many exciting recent developments in the field including the proof of Zagier's conjecture (expressing the regulator in terms of classical polylogarithms) in weight 4 by Goncharov and Rudenko (2018) following a depth reduction formula by Gangl (2016), the general depth reduction (to half the weight) by Rudenko (2020, formerly a conjecture of Goncharov), the precise formulation of cluster polylogarithms and depth reduction in weight 6 by Matveiakin and Rudenko (2022), a cluster formulation of the second motivic Chern class by Goncharov and Kislinskyi (2021), and the iterated integral expressions for Grassmannian and Aomoto polylogarithms by Charlton, Gangl and Radchenko (2019).

The second fall workshop on “Low Complexity Dynamical Systems” was organized by Darren Creutz (U.S. Naval Academy), Adam Kanigowski, and Rodrigo Treviño. This workshop focused on the study of two major conjectures that relate forms of low complexity: the S-adic conjecture, which asserts that there is an explicit relationship between (sub)linear word complexity and a substitutive structure, and the Pisot conjecture, which asserts that in the context of substitution systems, discrete spectrum is equivalent, roughly, to a specific form of algebraic substitutive structure (and presumably these are also implied, in some sense, by a word complexity property). 

“Statistical Inference on Networks and High-Dimensional Data” was the topic of the third fall workshop. Organized by Vince Lyzinski, Avanti Athreya (Johns Hopkins), and Minh Tang (NC State University), this workshop was held in honor of Carey Priebe’s 60th birthday. Topics discussed spanned classical statistical inference, such as testing and estimation, and modern machine learning, such as neural networks, information retrieval, and prediction.

The final fall conference on the “Mathematics of Malaria Transmission Dynamics” was organized by Lauren Childs (Virginia Tech), Abba Gumel, and Jemal Mohammed-Awel (Morgan State University). Some of the topics of this workshop included a genomic-epidemiology modeling framework for the population abundance of the malaria vector, formulating and fitting models for malaria spread that incorporate climate change and insecticide resistance, modeling impacts of climate change on the global distribution of malaria mosquitoes and disease burden, optimal deployment of insecticide-based resources (e.g., long-lasting insecticidal nets, indoor residual spraying, etc.), the emergence and evolution of parasite drug resistance and impact on malaria spread, and quantifying the impacts of immunity and parasite diversity on drug resistance evolution.

In addition to the four workshops, we held two distinguished Brin MRC lectures: the first by Wolfgang Dahmen (University of South Carolina/RWTH Aachen) who delivered a talk on “Predictive Science and Deep Learning.” The second talk on “Recent Progress in Spin Glass Theory” was delivered by Sourav Chatterjee (Stanford). 

We planned a very exciting and busy schedule for the upcoming spring semester. We will hold seven workshops, including a March workshop on “Recent Advances in Time Series Analysis” in celebration of the career of Benjamin Kedem. Three visitors will deliver Distinguished Brin MRC Lectures: Jens Marklof (University of Bristol), Svetlana Jitomirskaya (UC Irvine) and Nigel Hitchin (University of Oxford). 

We will also host a young investigators meeting in Dynamics, a mid-Atlantic meeting in mathematical biology, and a meeting of the Mathematics Department Chairs from the Big 10 universities. 

Looking forward, we advertised two summer schools for Summer 2024: a summer school on “Mixing Fluids Across Planetary Scales” organized by our colleagues from the Departments of Astronomy, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, and Geology, and a summer school on “PDE and Randomness.”

I said it before, and I will say it again—we could not have hoped for a better start for the Brin Mathematics Research Center.

Written by: Doron Levy, Director of the Brin Mathematics Research Center