Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A sub-Riemannian manifold M is a connected smooth manifold such that the only smooth curves in M which are admissible are those whose tangent vectors at any point are restricted to a particular subset of all possible tangent vectors.  Such spaces have several applications in physics and engineering, as well as in the study of hypo-elliptic operators.  We will  construct a random walk on M which converges to a process whose infinitesimal generator  is  one of the natural sub-elliptic  Laplacian  operators.  We will also describe these  Laplacians geometrically and discuss the difficulty of defining one which is canonical.   Examples will be provided.  This is a joint work with Tom Laetsch.

Inspired by the interval decomposition of persistence modules and the extended Newick format of phylogenetic networks, we show that, inside the larger category of partially ordered Reeb graphs, every Reeb graph with n leaves and first Betti number s, is equal to a coproduct of at most 2s trees with (n + s) leaves. An implication of this result, is that Reeb graphs are fixed parameter tractable when the parameter is the first Betti number. We propose partially ordered Reeb graphs as a natural framework for modeling time consistent phylogenetic networks.  We define a notion of interleaving distance on partially ordered Reeb graphs which is analogous to the notion of interleaving distance for ordinary Reeb graphs. This suggests using the interleaving distance as a novel metric for time consistent phylogenetic networks.

This presentation reviews different concepts of solution of a differential equation, in particular stressing the need to modify the classical theory when we want to deal with discontinuous systems.  We will review the concept of classical solution, and then of Caratheodory solution and Filippov solution, motivating with simple examples the need for these extensions.