Un of Tenn | Math Department

Seminars and Colloquiums
for the week of October 19, 2009

Speaker:

Professor Yulong Xing, Monday
Dongsheng Wu, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Monday
Joe Hughe, Tuesday
Mr. Keith Penrod, Wednesday
Professor Jerzy Dydak , Wednesday
Joan Lind, Belmont University, Nashville, Wednesday
Professor Fernando Schwartz, Wednesday
Dr. Sharon Bewick, NIMBioS, Thursday
Mr. Keith Penrod, Friday
Professor Mihai Putinar, Friday

Monday, October 19

DE/APPLIED MATH & COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 – 4:35 p.m.
ROOM: HBB 112
SPEAKER: Professor Yulong Xing, UTK
TITLE: “High order well balanced methods”
ABSTRACT: Many applications lead to hyperbolic systems of conservation laws with source terms. A challenge in the numerical analysis of such systems is to maintain the fundamental equilibria, and to compute their perturbations accurately. A typical example which has been extensively studied, and led to the so called well-balanced schemes, is the shallow water equation over a non-flat topography.

In this talk, I will present some recently developed high order accurate well-balanced methods to a class of hyperbolic systems with separable source terms including the shallow water equations. Such well balanced methods include finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes, finite volume WENO schemes and discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods. I will conclude the presentation with a number of numerical experiments.

PROBABILITY SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 – 4:25 p.m.
ROOM: HBB 132
SPEAKER: Dongsheng Wu, University of Alabama in Huntsville
TITLE: “Local Times of Anisotropic Gaussian Random Fields under an Anisotropic Metric”
ABSTRACT: In this talk, we establish sharp local and global Hölder conditions for the local times of a large class of anisotropic Gaussian random fields under a corresponding anisotropic metric, and apply these results to study sample path properties of the Gaussian fields. Furthermore, we compare our results with the ones under Euclidean metric. This talk is based on a joint work with Yimin Xiao.

Tuesday, October 20

MATH ECOLOGY SEMINAR
TIME: 9:00 – 9:50 a.m.
ROOM: NIMBioS small conference room
SPEAKER: Joe Hughe
TITLE: “Habitat location for the western prairie fringer orchid”

Wednesday, October 21

ALGEBRA SEMINAR
TIME: 2:30 – 3:20 p.m.
ROOM: 1ST Floor Temple Court (in Math Tutorial Center)
SPEAKER: Mr. Keith Penrod
TITLE: “Big Free Groups, II”

COARSE GEOMETRY SEMINAR
TIME: 11:15 – 12:05 p.m.
ROOM: HBB 112
SPEAKER: Professor Jerzy Dydak
TITLE: "Property A is equivalent to large scale paracompactness
for spaces of bounded geometry"
ABSTRACT: If time permits we will show Sundberg's proof of the fact positive unit spheres of l1(X) and l^p(X) are uniformly homeomorphic if p > 1.

ANALYSIS AND PROBABILITY JOINT SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 – 4:35 p.m.
ROOM: HBB 102
SPEAKER: Joan Lind, Belmont University, Nashville
TITLE: “Fractal curves and phases of the Loewner equation”
ABSTRACT: The Loewner differential equation...(pdf version of abstract)

GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS SEMINAR (Optimal Transportation)
TIME: 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.
ROOM: Haslam Business Building, 102
SPEAKER: Professor Fernando Schwartz
TITLE: TBA

Thursday, October 22

JUNIOR COLLOQUIUM
TIME: 3:35 – 4:35 p.m.
ROOM: HBB 102
SPEAKER: Dr. Sharon Bewick, NIMBioS
TITLE: “Modeling Local Community Responses to Climate Change”
ABSTRACT: I will be talking about the development of a mechanistic mathematical framework that models both competitive and mutualistic interspecific interactions with the goal of interpreting community dynamics and altered community structure under a warming regime. In particular, I will focus on climatic change as it affects ant communities in the temperate forests of eastern North America. To that end, the primary interspecific interactions that I will be discussing will relate to competition between ants for food resources. Previous models have considered competitive interactions between ants in terms of dominance-discovery tradeoffs. Certainly, global climate change may perturb both the dominance relationships between species and/or the discovery abilities of individual species, and this may have predictable consequences on community composition. More recently, however, several empirical studies have suggested that a dominance-thermal tolerance tradeoff may be more important than a dominance-discovery tradeoff, at least in the temperate forests of eastern North America. With this tradeoff, the impact of global climate change is even more obvious. I will therefore discuss the development of mechanistic mathematical models that capture the features of dominance-thermal tolerance tradeoffs and the possibility of using these models to predict community composition, both under current climatic conditions and under a warming regime. Finally, I will briefly touch on aspects related to modeling the impact that the ant community has on the plant community through ant-plant seed dispersal mutualisms.

Friday, October 23

TOPOLOGY SEMINAR
TIME: 11:15 – 12:05 p.m.
ROOM: JHB 12
SPEAKER: Mr. Keith Penrod
TITLE: "Snake Lemma and the long exact sequence."

MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM
TIME: 3:35 – 4:35 p.m.
ROOM: HBB 102
SPEAKER: Professor Mihai Putinar
TITLE: “The Physics and Mathematics of Planar Elliptic Growth”
ABSTRACT: Several planar growth phenomena, such as electrical deposition, growth of bacteria or crystals follow a simple natural equilibrium law. In mathematical terms this law relates the boundary velocity of the interface with the normal derivative of the Green function of the region, whence the name of "Laplacian Growth". Non-trivial links to potential theory and conformal mapping will be presented. One step further, a discretization of the growing process can be understood from the point of view of the asymptotics of complex Orthogonal polynomials. From the point of view of infinite dimensional dynamical systems "Laplacian Growth" is no less interesting: it is completely integrable, of a 2D Toda Lattice type. Several simple examples and mathematical ramifications of Laplacian Growth will be discussed.

If you are interested in giving or arranging a talk for one of our seminars or colloquiums, please review our calendar.

If you have questions, or a date you would like to confirm, please contact Dr. Steve Wise.

Week of:

Past notices: