Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Pollen grain surface morphologies are famously diverse, and each species displays a unique, replicable pattern. The function of these microstructures, however, has not been elucidated. We show electron microscopy evidence that the templating of these patterns is formed by a phase separation of a polysaccharide mixture on the cell membrane surface. Here we present a Landau theory of phase transitions to ordered states describing all extant pollen morphologies. We show that 10% of all morphologies can be characterized as equilibrium states with a well-defined wavelength of the pattern. The rest of the patterns have a range of wavelengths on the surface that can be recapitulated by exploring the evolution of a conserved dynamics model. We then perform an evolutionary trait reconstruction. Surprisingly, we find that although the equilibrium states have evolved multiple times, evolution has not favored these ordered-polyhedral like shapes and perhaps their patterning is simply a natural consequence of a phase separation process without cross-linkers.  

We will go over hyperfields and polynomials over hyperfields. We will discuss the current theory as well as new directions.

The goal of this talk is to explain the sense in which the natural algebraic structure of the singular chains on a path-connected space determines its fundamental group functorially. This new basic piece about the algebraic topology of spaces, which tells us that the fundamental group may be determined from homological data, has several interesting and deep implications. An example of a corollary of our statement is the following extension of a classical theorem of Whitehead: a continuous map between path-connected pointed topological spaces is a weak homotopy equivalence if and only if the induced map between the differential graded coalgebras of singular chains is a Koszul weak equivalence (i.e. a quasi-isomorphism after applying the cobar functor). A deeper implication, which is work in progress, is that this allows us to give a complete description of infinity groupoids in terms of homological algebra.

There are three main ingredients that come into play in order to give a precise formulation and proof of our main statement: 1) we extend a classical result of F. Adams from 1956 regarding the “cobar construction” as an algebraic model for the based loop space of a simply connected space, 2) we make use of the homotopical symmetry of the chain approximations to the diagonal map on a space, and 3) we apply a duality theory for algebraic structures known as Koszul duality. This is joint work with Mahmoud Zeinalian and Felix Wierstra.

In this talk I will discuss algorithms for a uniform generation of random graphs with a given degree sequence. Let $M$ be the sum of all degrees and $\Delta$ be the maximum degree of a given degree sequence. McKay and Wormald described a switching based algorithm for the generation of graphs with given degrees that had expected runtime $O(M^2\Delta^2)$, under the assumption $\Delta^4=O(M)$. I will present a modification of the McKay-Wormald algorithm that incorporates a new rejection scheme and uses the same switching operation. A new algorithm has expected running time linear in $M$, under the same assumptions.

I will also describe how a new rejection scheme can be integrated into other graph generation algorithms to significantly reduce expected runtime, as well as how it can be used to generate contingency tables with given marginals uniformly at random.

This talk is based on the joint work with Jane Gao and Nick Wormald.