Department of Mathematics FAS Harvard University One Oxford Street Cambridge MA 02138 USA Tel: (617) 495-2171 Fax: (617) 495-5132

What is Trivial Notions?

The Trivial Notions seminar is held once a week in the Mathematics Department at Harvard University. The target audience is the graduate student body of the Department, and those giving talks are (almost always) graduate students in the Department. Talks can be on any topic, but they should be accessible to graduate students!

The seminar is a great way to find out what other students are thinking about. It's also a great way to practice talking mathematics in front of others, without the distraction of scary professors in the audience.

This is an archive page. The current Seminar announcements are here. There are still some few blank spots in this archive. If you were organizing trivial notions or gave a talk in this series, or some of the reconstructed seminar titles need correction, please send details to webmaster@math.

2000-2001: organized by Deepee Khosla



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
13 Oct 2000 David Dumas Moduli of Pentagons 20 Oct 2000 Pete Clark Geometric Galois Theory
27 Oct 2000 Laura DeMarco Alexandrov Geometry: the complexity of convexity 3 Nov 2000 Jiun-Cheng Chen Rational Curves on an Algebraic Variety
2 Feb 2001 Izzet Coskun Colors, the Zeta Function and the Moduli Space of Curves 9 Feb 2001 Nick Rogers Things the NSA Doesn't Want You to Know or, Obsolete Factoring Techniques
16 Feb 2001 Peter Green Special values of Hasse-Weil L-functions 23 Feb 2001 Deeppe Khosla Quantum Cohomology, Or, what is this Mirror Symmetry thing, anyway?
9 Mar 2001 Vivek Mohta Quantum Gravity No Strings Attached 21 Sep 2001 Spiro Karigiannis Exceptional Algebras and Minimal Submanifolds Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

2001-2002: organized by Izzet Coskun and Rob Neel



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
28 Sep 2001 Marty Weissman Heisenburg - Physics = Phun 5 Oct 2001 Nick Ramsey tau(n) ~ sigma11(n) (mod *) could you be * ? come find out!
19 Oct 2001 Andy Neitzke Topological Quantum Field Theory: Who's Afraid of Simon Donaldson? 26 Oct 2001 Edward Lee The Geometry of Throwing Books It's All in the Wrist (and the Lagrangian Dynamics)
30 Nov 2001 Rosa Sena-Dias Symplectic Underground 1 Feb 2002 Laura DeMarco Entropy
15 Feb 2002 Soroosh Yazdani Formal Languages and Number Theory 22 Feb 2002 Izzet Coskun Billiards, Weierstrass Points and Brill-Noether Theory
1 Mar 2002 Deepee Khosla The 0-Brane Meets the 2-Brane: Bundles on an Elliptic Curve 8 Mar 2002 Namhoon Kim Critical Phenomena
15 Mar 2002 Jeng-Daw Yu Algebraic Cycles 5 Apr 2002 Sabin Cautis One Connexion Between The Temperley-Lieb Algebra And Combinatorics
12 Apr 2002 Michael Schein Analysis over Totally Disconnected Fields. 19 Apr 2002 Florian Herzig p(n) ~ 1/(4n31/2) epi sqrt(2n/3)
25 Apr 2002 Jonathan Kaplan You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover: Calderon's Inverse Problem.

2002-2003: organized by Florian Herzig and Michael Schein



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
4 Oct 2002 Nick Ramsey If you're down with p, then you're down with me 11 Oct 2002 Erick Matsen Visualizing Hodge: Seeing The Hodge Theorem In Three Dimensions
18 Oct 2002 Michael Schein Transcendentalism Made Simple 25 Oct 2002 Matt Bainbridge The Arithmetic-Geometric Mean, Theta Functions
1 Nov 2002 Sarah Dean String Duality and the McKay Correspondence: 8 Nov 2002 Toby Gee epi sqrt(163)
22 Nov 2002 Spiro Karigiannis Behind the Green Door 6 Dec 2002 Marty Weissman Grothenspock
13 Dec 2002 Stephanie Yang I like fat points, and I cannot lie ... 31 Jan 2003 Pete Clark On Beyond Line Bundles: The Brauer Group of Almost
7 Feb 2003 Teruyoshi Yoshida How Far Did We Get Beyond Xn=1. 14 Feb 2003 Janet Chen Public Key Cryptography
21 Feb 2003 Alex Pekker Finding Some Order in Enough Disorder 28 Feb 2003 Maryam Mirzakhani Counting Lattice Points and Symplectic Geometry
7 Mar 2003 Sabin Cautis Pattern Algebras For Groups 14 Mar 2003 Izzet Coskun The Mystic Hexagram and Configurations of Points
4 Apr 2003 Abhinav Kumar The Ideal Suspects 11 Apr 2003 Sug-Woo Shin How Far Can You Climb?
18 Apr 2003 Matt Bainbridge The Circle Squared! 3. Oct 2003 Teruyoshi Yoshida The Best Version of Galois Theory for You, With Love
10. Oct 2003 Jeng-Daw Yu A Little Bit about Formal Groups 24. Oct 2003 Jay Pottharst Many Twisted Interpolations, Part I Continued
7. Nov 2003 Cameron Freer The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet 14. Nov 2003 Ethan Cotterill The idal suspects Part II: A gentle Application of Gröbner Bases
12 Dec 2003 Izzet Coskun The story of K3s: An abridged history of the Harvard Math Department

2003- 2004: organized by Alex Pekker, Sug-Woo Shin and Sonal Jain



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
20. Feb 2004 Alex Pekker Dynamics on the Circle, or What I read for My Minor Thesis 16. Apr 2004 David Harvey Selberg's Symmetry Formula And Why You Should Care (Part I)
29. Apr 2004 Jayce Getz Borcherds Exponents of Modular Forms 7. May 2004 Jeehoon Park Tate's Thesis
14. May 2004 Ciprian Manolescu Quantum Topology and Gauge Theory

2004-2005: organized by David Harvey and Jesse Kass



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
8 Oct 2004 Jonathan Pottharst Black Magic 15 Oct 2004 Jesse Kass Putting the Fun back in the FUNdamental group
22 Oct 2004 Sabin Cautis Khovanov Homology 29 Oct 2004 Chung Pang Mok Some calculus of differential equations (or early works of Deligne and Katz)
12 Nov 2004 Abhinav Kumar Then a miracle occurs 19 Nov 2004 Kathy Paur Virus: The Game
3 Dec 2004 Andrew Lobb Jake's Thing 10 Dec 2004 Cameron Freer General Deadlock Detection
4 Feb 2005 Florian Herzig Ramanujan Redux 11 Feb 2005 David Harvey Szemerédi's Theorem
18 Feb 2005 Kai-Wen Lan Points at Infinity 25 Feb 2005 Ivan Petrakiev Self associated sets of points in Pn
4 Mar 2005 Sug-Woo Shin The World is Twisted 18 Mar 2005 Thomas Barnet-Lamb The Dold Thom Theorem
25 Mar 2005 Teruyoshi Yoshida Dividing Lemniscates 8 Apr 2005 Dawei Chen How high can the genus be?
15 Apr 2005 Michael Schein The Expanding Universe 22 Apr 2005 Ethan Cotterill How to make random curves of genus up to 14
29 Apr 2005 Valentino Tosatti The geometry of hairy manifolds 6 May 2005 Andrew Dittmer A Superficial Guide to Factoring Ideals in Shallow Fields

2005-2006: organized by Sam Isaacson and Valentino Tosatti



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
23 Sep 2005 Teruyoshi Yoshida Revising the Canon 30 Sep 2005 Dawei Chen Counting Rational Curves
7 Oct 2005 Thomas Barnet-Lamb Master Stacks 14 Oct 2005 Maksym Fedorchuk Another way to Draw an Algebraic Curve
21 Oct 2005 Jay Pottharst Brauer's Theorem and the Grothendieck Spectrum of a Finite Group 28 Oct 2005 Chung-Pang Mok Trigonometric Solution to Pell Equation
4 Nov 2005 Rina Anno The ADHM construction: from Yang Mills to coherent sheaves on Pn 2 Dec 2005 Chen-Yu Chi Complex varieties are so real!
9 Dec 2005 Abhinav Kumar Probabilistically checkable proofs 16 Dec 2005 Jesse Kass The Inverse Galois Problem
3 Feb 2006 Lin Han Eichler Shimura Theory 9 Feb 2006 Kai-Wen Lan Thetanullwerte
16 Feb 2006 Valentino Tosatti Uniqueness of CPn 2 Mar 2006 Sam Isaacson Formal Groups and Complex Cobordism
9 Mar 2006 Suh-Hyun Choi Global Approximation Problem 13 Mar 2006 Evan Bullock Circle Packing
23 Mar 2006 Jeechul Woo Real simple Lie algebras 6 Apr 2006 Sug-Woo Shin GL2 and quaternion algebras
10 Apr 2006 Michael Schein The Bernstein Gelfand Gelfand Complex 20 Apr 2006 David Geraghty Arakelov Geometry
1 May 2006 Samik Basu Vector Fields on Spheres 11 May 2006 Thomas Handscomb Surface Bundles Over Surfaces
18 May 2006 Ryan Reich Geometry of Moduli Problems 26 May 2006 Aleksandar Subotic A Nonsqueezing Theorem Via Floer Theory

2006-2007: organized by Ryan Reich and Ruifang Song



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
22 Sep 2006 Valentino Tosatti The Lefschetz fixed point formula 29 Sep 2006 Jonathan Pottharst Discuss your favorite Galois representation in ten words or less
6 Oct 2006 Maksym Fedorchuk Algebraic surfaces: from Enriques to Mori 13 Oct 2006 Reid Barton Cartier Foata Theory
20 Oct 2006 Chen-Yu Chi Complex varieties are really real! 27 Oct 2006 Thomas Barnet-Lamb How to vote
3 Nov 2006 Samuel Isaacson Homotopy everything 17 Nov 2006 David Harvey Computing 2 x 2 for large values of 2
1 Dec 2006 Dawei Chen Counting covers of an ellipitic curve 8 Dec 2006 Ryan Reich The Multiplicity One theorems
2 Feb 2007 David Smyth Uniformity of Rational Points 8 Feb 2007 Jesse Kass NOT a Talk About Stacks
15 Feb 2007 Lin Han There are no abelian varieties over Z 22 Feb 2007 Sug-Woo Shin Bruhat-Tits building
1 Mar 2007 Ji Oon Lee Symmetric, but not self-adjoint 8 Mar 2007 David Roe Sums of squares formulas
15 Mar 2007 Kai-Wen Lan Fair Chance 13 Apr 2007 Samik Basu The Hairy Ball Theorem and the Brouwer fixed point theorem
20 Apr 2007 Andrew Lobb My name is, and I am a number theorist 27 Apr 2007 Stewart Wilcox Who needs inverses anyway?
4 May 2007 Cameron Freer 050407 Trees in One

2007-2008: organized by Si Li and Chung-Jun Tsai.



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
27 Sep 2007 Dawei Chen G.I.T. 4 Oct 2007 Anh-Vinh Le Why does characteristic polynomial factor?
11 Oct 2007 Jesse Kass Is Mg connected? 18 Oct 2007 Reid Barton Representation theory of the symmetric group
25 Oct 2007 Jeechul Woo How can we find elliptic curves having many rational points? 1 Nov 2007 PoNing Chen Framed Cobordism
15 Nov 2007 Aaron Silberstein Descent and Cohomology 29 Nov 2007 Harald Helfgott (IAS/Bristol) Growth in groups - Abelian and otherwise
6 Dec 2007 David Harvey What does Cp look like? 14 Dec 2007 Frederick Van-Der-Wyck A practical introduction to deformation theory
31 Jan 2008 Valentino Tosatti Kähler, Calabi and Yau 8 Feb 2008 Samuel Isaacson Brown representability
14 Feb 2008 Ji Oon Lee Certain types of the uncertainty principle 21 Feb 2008 Evan Bullock Coupling from the Past
28 Feb 2008 Ryan Reich Basic Calculus 7 Mar 2008 Samik Basu Pontrjagin classes and some homotopic manifolds which are not diffeomorphic
13 Mar 2008 Ruifang Song Du Val singularities and McKay correspondence 20 Mar 2008 Ming-Tao Chuan Balanced, but not Kähler
3 Apr 2008 Kai-Wen Lan Duality and Plethysm 10 Apr 2008 David Roe Automorphisms of Riemann Surfaces
17 Apr 2008 Chung-Jun Tsai Gauss-Bonnet 24 Apr 2008 Si Li Rational curves in P2
1 May 2008 Thomas Koberda Homology 3-Spheres and Mapping Class Groups

2008-2009: organized by Kathy Körner and Thomas Koberda



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
25 Sep 2008 Yi Li The Combinatorics of Hodge Integrals 2 Oct 2008 Eric Wofsey How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Transfinite Induction
9 Oct 2008 Aaron Silberstein Intersection Homology: Saving Poincaré Duality 16 Oct 2008 Sam Isaacson Stable Splittings of Spaces
23 Oct 2008 Thomas Barnet-Lamb How to Vote 30 Oct 2008 Ethan Street The Geometry of Rigid Body Dynamics, or, How Not to Throw Books
6 Nov 2008 Kathy Körner A Brief Overview of the Philosophy of Mathematics 13 Nov 2008 Jack Huizenga How To Count Like Schubert
20 Nov 2008 Carl Erickson Modular Forms and You 27 Nov 2008 Thanksgiving No Seminar.
4 Dec 2008 Maryanthe Malliaris (UC Berkeley) Pseudofinite sets 11 Dec 2008 Thomas Koberda How to Abelianize Groups That Are Difficult to Abelianize
5 Feb 2009 Valentino Tosatti Metric Sociology 12 Feb 2009 Samik Basu Hirzebruch Problem 8
19 Feb 2009 Chen-Yu Chi Be Rational, Geometry! 26 Feb 2009 David Roe The Weil Conjectures
5 Mar 2009 Ana Caraiani Stacks for Dummies 12 Mar 2009 Si Li Feynman Integrals and Three-fold Invariants
19 Mar 2009 Tanya Kobylyatskaya A Gentle Introduction to Heegaard Floer Homology 2 Apr 2009 Ryan Reich Evaluating Bézout's Theorem
9 Apr 2009 Yu-Shen Lin Mirror Symmetry and Predicting Enumerative Invariants 16 Apr 2009 David Geraghty Representations of Gal(Q/Q)
23 Apr 2009 Jack Thorne Toric Varieties 30 Apr 2009 Aleksandar Subotic Homological Homological Mirror Symmetry for the Elliptic Curve

2009-2010: organized by Giulio Tiozzo and Jack Thorne



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
10 Sep 2009 Jack Huizenga How to count like Michel Chasles (and not like Jakob Steiner) 17 Sep 2009 Nicolás Ojeda Bär The Standard Conjectures
24 Sep 2009 Ana Caraiani An Introduction To Stacks 1 Oct 2009 Ethan Street 3-manifolds that go bump in the night
9 Oct 2009 Thomas Koberda When can we expect K(G,1) to be finite dimensional? 15 Oct 2009 Eric Wofsey Homotopy associativity and commutativity
22 Oct 2009 Aaron Silberstein Two Curves, One Cusp 29 Oct 2009 Oleg Ivrii Centaurs Squared
5 Nov 2009 Wushi Goldring Unifying Themes Suggested By Belyi's Theorem 12 Nov 2009 Carl Erickson The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture
19 Nov 2009 Sam Raskin Faiscism 3 Dec 2009 Anand Deopurkar How non-complete is Mg?
11 Feb 2010 Giulio Tiozzo Torus diffeomorphisms vs. common sense 18 Feb 2010 Jack Thorne Equidistribution in number theory
25 Feb 2010 David Roe Coxeter Groups and 4-dimensional Polytopes 4 Mar 2010 Andrei Negut Attractors and epsilon-invisible sets
11 Mar 2010 Anand Patel 12 Points on P1 25 Mar 2010 Tanya Kobylyatskaya Knot Theory
8 Apr 2010 Bao Le Hung Derived category of coherent sheaves 15 Apr 2010 Hansheng Diao Quantum Unique Ergodicity --- from quantum physics to number theory
22 Apr 2010 Ronen Mukamel Billiards on a Regular Pentagon

2010-2011: organized by Hansheng Diao and Aliakbar Daemi



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
23 Sep 2010 Nicolas Ojeda Bar Modular forms and Galois representations 30 Sep 2010 Jack Thorne Rational double points
7 Oct 2010 Thomas Koberda The large-scale geometry of groups 14 Oct 2010 Yi Li Calderon-Zygmund decomposition and Harnack inequality
21 Oct 2010 Stergios Antonakoudis On Rigidity of Maps of Closed Riemann Surfaces 28 Oct 2010 Oleg Ivrii The Winning Code
4 Nov 2010 Andrew Dittmer Strangely Symmetric Curves 18 Nov 2010 Carl Erickson Hilbert's Fourteenth problem
02 Dec 2010 Nathan Kaplan Lattice Packings of Spheres 17 Feb 2011 Giulio Tiozzo I Knead U
24 Feb 2011 Samuel Raskin When do differential equations have meromorphic solutions? 03 Mar 2011 Ryosuke Takahashi The Bernstein Problem
10 Mar 2011 Nathan Pflueger Tropical Riemann-Roch 24 Mar 2011 Eric Wofsey Topological Abelian Groups
31 Mar 2011 Anand Deopurkar What can be computed in mathematics? 07 Apr 2011 Andrei Negut Laumon
14 Apr 2011 Aaron Silberstein Nilpotent Groups and Their Lie Algebras 21 Apr 2011 Jerry Wang BCGRS - Baby Coxeter Groups and Root Systems

2011-2012: organized by Eric Riedl and Omar Antolin Camarena



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
22 Sep 2011 Omar Antolin Camarena Tiling polygons by similar polygons 29 Sep 2011 Jeff Kuan Interlacing particle systems
06 Oct 2011 Matthew Woolf Amenable Groups 13 Oct 2011 Ryosuke Takahashi Minkowski's Problem
20 Oct 2011 Eric Riedl The Syzygy 27 Oct 2011 Nathan Pflueger Semigroups and curves
03 Nov 2011 Stergios Antonakoudis Dynamics on Mg 10 Nov 2011 Jerry Wang BCGRS II - Baby Coxeter Groups and Root Systems II
17 Nov 2011 Chao Li Shimura Curves 01 Dec 2011 Charmaine Sia Surgery on manifolds
08 Dec 2011 Hansheng Diao Arithmetic Progressions in Primes 26 Jan 2012 Anand Deopurkar Can you solve the quintic?
02 Feb 2012 Aaron Silberstein TBA 09 Feb 2012 Nathan Kaplan Incidence Problems in the Plane
16 Feb 2012 George Boxer Crystals, Young Tableaux, Littelmann Paths, and Representation Theory 23 Feb 2012 Ethan Street The Dzhanibekov Effect, or The Tennis Racket Theorem
01 Mar 2012 Carl Erickson The Siegel Zero 08 Mar 2012 Giulio Tiozzo Apollonian circle packings
22 Mar 2012 Gabriel Bujokas Poncelet's Porism 29 Mar 2012 Aliakbar Daemi Lie Geometry
05 Apr 2012 Atanas Atanasov Topology of hypersurface singularities 12 Apr 2012 Yu-Shen Lin Mirror Symmetry from SYZ
19 Apr 2012 Pei-Yu Tsai Spherical Whittaker functions

2012-2013: organized by Peter Smillie and Chen-Chiang Tsai



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
13 Sep 2012 Aliakbar Daemi Infinite Dimensional Morse Theory for Low Dimensional Manifolds 20 Sep 2012 Omar Antolin Camarena No Wandering Domains
27 Sep 2012 Cheng-Chiang Tsai Localization to 27 Lines on the Cubic Surface 04 Oct 2012 Jie Zhou Monodromy, Moduli Spaces and Mirror Manifolds
11 Oct 2012 Chao Li Mumford Curves 18 Oct 2012 Benjamin Stetler Information Theory and the Channel Coding Theorem
25 Oct 2012 Konstantin Matveev Limits of Random Structures 01 Nov 2012 Oleg Ivrii Moduli of Curves
08 Nov 2012 Jeffrey Kuan The Representation Theory and Combinatorics behind Random Partitions 15 Nov 2012 Nathan Pflueger Rational Normal Scrolls
29 Nov 2012 Ryosuke Takahashi Maximum Principle for Second Order Fully Nonlinear Elliptic Equations 06 Dec 2012 Pei-Yu Tsai Local New Forms for A_n
31 Jan 2013 Eric Riedl Brauer Groups 14 Feb 2013 Gijs Heuts Quillen Homology
21 Feb 2013 Philip Tynan Using Link Theory to Understand the Isotopies of Real Algebraic Curves 28 Feb 2013 Peter Smillie Geometry of diffeomorphism groups
07 Mar 2013 Francesco Cavazzani From 3264 conics to wonderful compactifications 14 Mar 2013 Thanos Papaioannou The non-abelian p-curvature conjecture
28 Mar 2013 Jerry Wang To count or not to count 11 Apr 2013 Alex Perry Fundamental groups of projective varieties
18 Apr 2013 Carl Wang Erickson Quivers 25 Apr 2013 Benjamin Stetler Doing Analysis by Tossing a Coin
02 May 2013 Nathan Kaplan Zeta Functions of Groups and Rings'

2013-2014: organized by Erick Knight and Lukas Brantner



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
12 Sep 2013 Tom Lovering p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa Main Conjectures 19 Sep 2013 Eric Riedl Complete Families of Smooth Curves
26 Sep 2013 Justin Campbell Geometric Class Field Theory after Deligne 03 Oct 2013 Francesco Cavazzani ADE Singularities and Slodowy Slices
10 Oct 2013 Omar Antolin-Camarena Homotopy Theory in the Foundations of Mathematics 17 Oct 2013 George Boxer Congruences of Modular Forms and Galois Representations
24 Oct 2013 Gijs Heuts Some Elements in Stable Homotopy Groups of Spheres 31 Oct 2013 Chao Li Deligne-Lustig Curves
7 November 2013 Erick Knight Period 3 Implies Chaos 14 November 2013 Jeff Kuan The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation
21 November 2013 Nathan Pflueger TBD 12 December 2013 Andrew Dittmer Shintani + Tate = ?
6 Feb 2014 Stergios Antonakoudis Measured Foliations and Riemann Surfaces 13 Feb 2014 Cheng-Chiang Tsai Local transfer and Langlands correspondence
20 Feb 2014 Ben Landon Anderson Localization 27 Feb 2014 Krishanu Sankar Markov Chains and Spectral Gaps
5 March 2014 Ananth Shankar Artin's Primitive Root Conjecture

2014-2015: organized by Ben Landon and Max Menzies



Date Speaker Title Date Speaker Title
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