JHU Slow Pitch Seminars
The Slow Pitch Seminars are arranged by graduate students for graduate students, and provide a forum for professors to present their work, interests and personal sides. Students are encouraged to use these seminars to gain a view of the current work in the department, get a closer look at potential advisors and to glimpse into the person behind the research.
Input from the graduate students of the math department is encouraged. We are constantly looking for suggestions about the format, questions for interviews and the line-up of professors. Please contact Duncan or Susama with any comments.
Schedule
| Time & Date |
Location |
Speaker |
Topic |
| 5-6pm, Thursday, Sept. 25* |
Krieger 301 |
William Minicozzi |
Shapes of embedded minimal surfaces |
| 5-6pm, Tuesday, Oct. 3* |
Krieger 308 |
Steve Zelditch |
How to hear the shape of an anlalytic drum with a symmetry |
| 4:15-5:15pm, Tuesday, Oct. 24* |
A 3rd floor room |
Takashi Ono |
Gauss Sums and Poincare Sums |
| 4:30-5:30pm, Wednesday, Nov. 1* |
Krieger 308 |
J. Michael Boardman |
Complex Orientation, Unstably |
| 5-6pm, Wednesday, Nov. 15* |
Krieger 302 |
Joel Spruck |
Introduction to Monge Ampere equations in geometry |
'05-'06 Schedule
*Pizza will be served in the lounge a half hour prior to the talk
Summary
William Minicozzi
Shapes of embedded minimal surfaces
I will briefly introduce minimal surfaces, describe some of the classical
results, and try to give a bit of the flavor of recent developments.
Steve Zelditch
How to hear the shape of an analytic drum with a symmetry
The inverse spectral problem was stated by M. Kac (who taught at Hopkins) as: can you hear the shape of a drum? I.e. can you etermine a plane domain from its spectrum. I will introduce the problem and sketch the proof that indeed you can, if it is real analytic, simply connected and has one `up-down' symmetry
Takashi Ono
Gauss sums and Poincare sums
(NB: Dr. Ono has been very generous in providing detailed notes of his talk. Printouts will be available at the talk)
J. Michael Boardman
Complex Orientation, Unstably
An introduction to some of the algebra that is involved in describing unstable operations in multiplicative generalized cohomology theories. There will be some calculations, but no proofs
Joel Spruck
Introduction to Monge Ampere equations in geometry
The (elliptic) Monge-Ampere equations is a common thread running through many of the most important problems of Differential geometry because it is related to convexity and curvature. We will describe some of these classical problems (such as the Minkowski and Weyl embedding problems, the local isometric embedding problem for Riemannian metrics, the Calabi conjecture, ...) as a historical introduction to Monge-Ampere equations. I will then describe some of my own work on the Dirichlet problem and describe some geometric applications.