Fall 2023

• September 26: Xujia Chen (Harvard), Kontsevich’s invariants as topological invariants of configuration space bundles
• October 3: Ling Zhou (ICERM/Brown), Persistent cup product structures and related invariants
• October 10: Rita Jiménez Rolland (UNAM), On commensurators of abelian subgroups of mapping class groups
• October 17: Nir Gadish (Michigan), Letter-braiding invariants of words in groups
• October 24: John Oprea (Cleveland State), The rationality conjecture for topological complexity
• October 31: Oleg Lazarev (UMass Boston), Weinstein domains: a symplectic geometer’s handlebodies
• November 7 (virtual): Andreas Stavrou (Chicago), Configuration spaces of surfaces and the Johnson filtration
• November 28 (virtual, 12 pm): Magnus Botnan (VU Amsterdam), From (relative) homological algebra to machine learning
• December 5: Antonio Rieser (CIMAT), Sheaves on data through closure spaces

 

Spring 2023

• January 10: Mona Merling (Penn), Equivariant A-theory and spaces of equivariant h-cobordisms
• January 24 (noon, virtual): Bastian Rieck (Helmholtz Munich), Topology-based graph learning
• February 7: Sam Nariman (Purdue), Bounded and unbounded cohomology of diffeomorphism groups
• February 28 (noon, virtual): Juliet Cooke (Nottingham), Skein categories as factorisation homology
• March 21: Michael Ching (Amherst), Tangent infinity-categories and Goodwillie calculus
• March 28: Shmuel Weinberger (Chicago), Simplicial complexity of lens spaces and related stories
• April 4 (virtual): Adela Zhang (MIT), Mod p homology of configuration spaces via spectral Lie algebras
• April 11 (virtual): Bei Wang (Utah), Topology of word embeddings

 

Fall 2022

• September 13 (Ell Hall 411): Yajit Jain (Brown), Exotic smoothings of manifold bundles (note special location!)
• September 20: Ben Knudsen (Northeastern), Farber’s conjecture
• September 27: Alex Suciu (Northeastern), Cohomology, Bocksteins, and resonance
• October 4: Caitlin Lienkaemper (Boston), Estimating rank despite monotone distortion
• October 18: Manuel Rivera (Purdue), An algebraic model for the free loop space
• November 1: Olakunle Abawonse (Northeastern), Triangulations of Grassmannians and flag manifolds
• November 8 (Ell Hall 411): Facundo Mémoli (Ohio State) (note special location!), The Gromov–Hausdorff distance between spheres
• November 15 (noon, virtual): Ulrike Tillmann (Oxford) (note special time!), Moduli of punctured manifolds and their monodromy
• November 29 (virtual): Dev Sinha (Oregon), Rational measurement of groups
• December 6 (virtual): Angélica Osorno (Reed), (2-)categorical constructions and the multiplicative equivariant Barratt-Quillen-Priddy theorem

 

Spring 2022

• February 1 (noon): Giovanni Paolini (Amazon and Caltech, virtual) (note special time!), The homotopy type of complexified hyperplane arrangements
• February 8: Jon McCammond (UC Santa Barbara, virtual), Dual braids and the braid arrangement
• February 15: Luis Scoccola (Northeastern, in-person), Stability of homological invariants of multiparameter persistence modules
• February 22: Roberto Pagaria (Bologna, in-person), Asymptotic growth of Betti numbers of configuration spaces of an elliptic curve
• March 1: Thomas Brüstle (Sherbrooke, in-person), Homological approximations in persistence theory
• March 8 (noon): Florian Naef (Trinity, in-person) (note special time!), Trace amounts of torsion found
• March 8: Marcy Robertson (Melbourne, in-person), Automorphisms of seamed surfaces, modular operads and Galois actions
• March 22 (noon): Vladimir Dotsenko (Strasbourg, virtual) (note special time!), Rational homotopy type of the moduli space of stable rational curves
• March 29: Vance Blankers (Northeastern, in-person), Classifying compactifications of the moduli space of curves
• April 5: Radmila Sazdanovic (NC State, virtual), Bilinear pairings on two-dimensional cobordisms and generalizations of the Deligne category
• April 12 (noon): Andrew Blumberg (Columbia, virtual) (note special time!), Probabilistic stability theorems for topological data analysis
• April 19: Joshua Wen (Northeastern, in-person), The quantum Harish-Chandra homomorphism for GL_n
• April 26: Matthew Kahle (Ohio State, virtual), Configuration spaces of particles: homological solid, liquid, and gas
• May 3: Najib Idrissi (Paris Cité, in-person), Formality and non-formality of Swiss-Cheese operads and variants
• May 10: Marissa Masden (Oregon, in-person), Exact combinatorial and topological data for ReLU networks’ linear regions

 

Fall 2021

• September 7 (11 AM): Xuwen Zhu (Northeastern, hybrid), Compactified configuration spaces and singular geometry (note special time!)
• September 14: Nick Proudfoot (Oregon, fully remote), Equivariant log concavity in the cohomology of configuration spaces
• September 21: Anna Cepek (Oregon, fully remote), The combinatorics of configuration spaces of R^n
• October 5: Jose Perea (Northeastern, hybrid), Persistent Künneth theorems and quasiperiodicity
• October 19: Alexander Strang (Chicago, hybrid), The weak rotation expansion: using the Helmholtz–Hodge decomposition to explain Markov chains near equilibrium
• October 26: Amit Patel (Colorado State, fully remote), Functoriality of generalized persistence diagrams
• November 9: Jeremy Miller (Purdue, fully remote), Rognes’ connectivity conjecture
• November 16: Bena Tshishiku (Brown, hybrid), Surface bundles, monodromy, and arithmetic groups
• November 30: Carina Curto (Penn State, fully remote), Graph rules and topological insights for inhibitory network dynamics
• December 7: Carina Curto (Penn State, fully remote), Graph rules and topological insights for inhibitory network dynamics
• December 14: Andrew Blumberg (Columbia, hybrid), Probabilistic stability theorems for topological data analysis

 

Spring 2021

• February 9: Eva Elduque (Michigan), Mixed Hodge structures on Alexander modules
• February 16: Florian Frick (Carnegie Mellon), The Borsuk–Ulam theorem for higher dimensional codomains and applications
• February 23: Tarik Aougab (Haverford), Characterizing covers from simple closed curves
• March 9: Claudio Llosa Isenrich (Karlsruhe), Images of Kähler groups in products of surface groups and Kodaira fibrations
• March 23: Renee Hoekzema (Oxford), Cut-and-paste invariants of manifolds via algebraic K-theory
• March 30: Christin Bibby (Louisiana State), Fiber bundles of arrangement complements
• April 6: Jesus Gonzalez (Cinvestav), The cohomology ring of binary tree braid groups
• April 13: Alex Suciu (Northeastern), Finiteness properties, cohomology jump loci, and tropical varieties
• April 13: Mohamad Maassarani (Strasbourg)
• April 20: Andrea Bianchi (Copenhagen), Mapping class group actions on configuration spaces and the Johnson filtration

 

Fall 2020

• October 13: Najib Idrissi (IMJ-PRG), Real homotopy of configuration spaces
• October 20: Noémie Combe (MPI MiS), Complement of the discriminant variety, Gauss–skizze operads and hidden symmetries
• October 27: Hannah Alpert (UBC), Representation stability and configurations of disks in a strip
• November 3: Lei Chen (Caltech), Actions of Homeo and Diffeo groups on manifolds
• November 17: Safia Chettih (Southwestern), An infinity operad of normalized cacti
• November 24: David Recio-Mitter (Lehigh), Geodesic complexity of motion planning
• December 1: Dan Petersen (Stockholm), Factorization statistics and bug-eyed configuration spaces
• December 8: Nick Salter (Columbia), r-spin mapping class groups and applications

 

Spring 2020

• January 28: Matthew Hogancamp (Northeastern), Categorifying skeins in the solid torus
• February 11: Ruth Charney (Brandeis), Outer space for RAAGs
• February 18: Nathaniel Bottman (USC), The Fulton–MacPherson operad and Fukaya categories
• February 25: Kathryn Hess (EPFL), From precalculus to calculus in algebraic topology
• March 10: Alexander Kupers (Harvard), Double Steinberg coinvariants and the homology of general linear groups
• March 17: Lei Chen (Caltech)
• March 24: David Recio-Mitter (Lehigh)
• March 31: Safia Chettih (Southwestern)
• April 7: Nick Salter (Columbia)
• April 14: Jon McCammond (UCSB)

 

Fall 2019

• September 10: Nir Gadish (MIT), The ‘generating function’ of configuration spaces as a source for explicit formulas and representation stability
• September 17: Florian Naef (Northeastern University), String topology and the configuration space of two points
• September 24: Iva Halacheva (Northeastern University), Tangles, circuit algebras, and the Kashiwara–Vergne problem
• October 5: Kickoff mini-conference
• October 8: Aaron Abrams (Washington and Lee University), Area relations in square triangulations
• October 15: Benjamin Schweinhart (The Ohio State University), Fractal dimension estimation with persistent homology
• October 22: Phil Tosteson (University of Chicago), Homological stability and the Deligne–Mumford compactification
• October 29: Paolo Salvatore (Universita di Roma Tor Vergata), Koszul self-duality of the little discs operad’
• November 5:
  • Graham Denham (Western University), The Leray model of a matroid (3:15–4:15pm in 544NI)
  • John Wiltshire-Gordon (University of Wisconsin), FI-modules in high degree (4:30–5:30pm in 509LA)
• November 12: Eric Ramos (University of Oregon), Categories of graphs with contractions
• November 19: Felix Wierstra (Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and Université Paris 13), Cochains and rational homotopy type