Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In the 1970s, Girko made the striking observation that, after centering, traces of functions of large random matrices have approximately Gaussian distribution. This convergence is true without any further normalization provided f is smooth enough, even though the trace involves a number of terms equal to the dimension of the matrix. This is particularly interesting, because for some rougher, but still natural observables, like the number of eigenvalues in an interval, the fluctuations diverge. I will explain how such results can be obtained, focusing in particular on controlling the fluctuations when the function is not very regular.

Morphogenesis of curved bilayer membranes Buckling of curved membranes plays a prominent role in the morphogenesis of multilayered soft tissue, with examples ranging from tissue differentiation, the wrinkling of skin, or villi formation in the gut, to the development of brain convolutions. In addition to their biological relevance, buckling and wrinkling processes are attracting considerable interest as promising techniques for nanoscale surface patterning, microlens array fabrication, and adaptive aerodynamic drag control. Yet, owing to the nonlinearity of the underlying mechanical forces, current theoretical models cannot reliably predict the experimentally observed symmetry-breaking transitions in such systems. Here, we derive a generalized Swift-Hohenberg theory capable of describing the wrinkling morphology and pattern selection in curved elastic bilayer materials. Testing the theory against experiments on spherically shaped surfaces, we find quantitative agreement with analytical predictions separating distinct phases of labyrinthine and hexagonal wrinkling patterns. We highlight the applicability of the theory to arbitrarily shaped surfaces and discuss theoretical implications for the dynamics and evolution of wrinkling patterns.

In numerical algebraic geometry the key idea is to solve systems of polynomial equations via homotopy continuation. By this is meant, that the solutions of a system are tracked as the coefficients change continuously toward the system of interest. We study the tropicalisation of this process. Namely, we combinatorially keep track of the solutions of a tropical polynomial system as its coefficients change. Tropicalising the entire regeneration process of numerical algebraic geometry, we obtain a combinatorial algorithm for finding all tropical solutions. In particular, we obtain the mixed cells of the system in a mixed volume computation. Experiments suggest that the method is not only competitive but also asymptotically performs better than conventional methods for mixed cell enumeration. The method shares many of the properties of a recent tropical method proposed by Malajovich. However, using symbolic perturbations, reverse search and exact arithmetic our method becomes reliable, memory-less and well-suited for parallelisation.