Past Events

Alex Kontorovich - Rutgers Date/Time/Location Thursday, April 23, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Arithmetic Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds A construction due to Thurston assigns a hyperbolic 3-manifold to any Euclidean polyhedron. A basic question is to determine which such are arithmetic.

John Paul Barton – University of Pittsburgh Wednesday, April 22, 2026 Zoom opens: 10:30AM EDT Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT Statistical models to interpret and predict pathogen evolution Pathogen evolution is complex. Viruses must mutate constantly to escape from human immune

Lawrence Frolov – Rutgers Date/Time/Location Thursday, April 16, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Overcoming the arrival time quantum Zeno effect In classical mechanics, there is a conceptually clear method for computing the time at which a particle will arrive

Mehran Kardar - MIT Wednesday, April 15, 2026 Zoom opens: 10:30AM EDT Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING Life on a Noisy Seascape: Extinction, Growth, and Diversity Populations and communities rarely evolve in static environments; their fitness

David Huse – Princeton University Date/Time/Location Thursday, April 9, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Thermal first-order phase transitions and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis A many-body system with a thermal first-order phase transition exhibits an extensive discontinuity in the energy

Marc Mézard - Bocconi University, Milano Wednesday, April 8, 2026 Zoom opens: 10:30AM EDT Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING How diffusion theory is used to produce fake data Generative diffusion, in which one trains an algorithm

Konstantin Mischaikow - Rutgers Date/Time/Location Thursday, April 2, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Rigorously Characterizing Dynamics with Machine Learning The identification of dynamics from time series data is a problem of general interest. It is well established that dynamics

Avi Wigderson - IAS Wednesday, April 1, 2026 Zoom opens: 10:30AM EDT Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING The Value of Errors in Proofs (a fascinating journey from Turing’s 1936 R != RE to the 2020 breakthrough

Sanchit Chaturvedi - NYU Date/Time/Location Thursday, March 26, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Linear stability of traveling Maxwellians for Landau equation with very soft potentials In this talk, I will discuss the problem of linear stability of traveling Maxwellians

Karin A Dahmen - University of Illinois Wednesday, March 25, 2026 Zoom opens: 10:30AM EDT Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT Universal Avalanches and Prediction: from Nanoindentation and the Brain to Earthquakes and Stars? Slowly-compressed nano-crystals, bulk metallic glasses, rocks, granular materials,

Edward Witten - IAS Wednesday, March 18, 2026 Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING Wormholes “Wormholes'' are shortcuts between distant regions of space or of spacetime. After recalling the Einstein-Rosen bridge in Schwarzschild spacetime as a classic

Valerio Lucarini - University of Leicester Date/Time/Location Thursday, March 12, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Linear Response and Optimal Fingerprinting for Nonautonomous Systems We provide a link between response theory, pullback measures, and optimal fingerprinting method that paves the

Remi Monasson - LPENS Wednesday, March 11, 2026 Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING How can neural networks compute with few resources? Some insights from neuroscience. Despite the unsustainable growth in energy consumption by artificial intelligence models

Federico Bonetto – Georgia Institute of Technology Date/Time/Location Thursday, March 5, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Approach to equilibrium for a particle interacting with a harmonic thermal bath We study the long time evolution of the position-position correlation function

Robert Ziff - University of Michigan Wednesday, March 4, 2026 Zoom opens: 10:30AM EST Seminar begins: 10:45AM EST CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING Exact results and universality in anisotropic percolation Fundamental concepts in percolation include the phase transition, critical exponents,

Matt Young - Rutgers Date/Time/Location Thursday, February 26, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Eisenstein series and equidistribution Quantum chaos predicts that high energy eigenfunctions of the Laplacian on a negatively curved surface should exhibit chaotic behavior. For the modular

Martin Zirnbauer - Institute for Theoretical Physics Cologne Wednesday, February 25, 2026 Zoom opens: 10:30AM EST Seminar begins: 10:45AM EST CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING Is conformal symmetry violated at Anderson transitions? Conformal symmetry has been established as a powerful

Natan Andrei – Rutgers University Date/Time/Location Thursday, February 19, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Thermodynamics in a split Hilbert space: Quantum impurity in interacting environments A rich phase diagram arises when a quantum spin impurity is placed in an

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud - Capital Fund Management & Academie des Sciences Wednesday, February 18, 2026 Zoom opens: 10:30AM EST Seminar begins: 10:45AM EST CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING Random Multiplicative Growth and Inequalities: A Rich Theoretical Framework Random multiplicative growth processes

Facundo Mémoli – Rutgers University Date/Time/Location Thursday, February 12, 2026, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705 Distance distributions and inverse problems for metric measure spaces Many problems in data science—shape analysis, object recognition, and object classification—require comparing probability distributions that live