Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

How much of space can be filled with pairwise non-overlapping copies of a given solid? This is one of the oldest problems in mathematics, intriguing since the times of Aristotle, and remaining remarkably elusive until present times. For example, the three-dimensional sphere packing problem (posed by Kepler in 1611) was only solved in 1998 by Ferguson and Hales. In this talk, I will provide some historical and modern applications of geometric packing problems, and I will introduce a methodology to derive upper bounds on the maximal density of such packings. These upper bounds are obtained by an infinite dimensional linear program, which is not computationally tractable. However, this problem can be approximated by using tools from sums of squares relaxations and symmetry reduction (harmonic analysis and representation theory), leading to rigorous computational upper bounds on the density. Time permitting, I will present ongoing work with Maria Dostert, Fernando de Oliveira Filho and Frank Vallentin on the density of translative packings of superspheres (i.e., ell_p balls). This is an introductory talk: no previous knowledge of sums of squares relaxations or symmetry reduction is assumed.

Bernstein's inequality connecting the norms of a (trigonometric) polynomial with the norm of its derivative is 100 years old. The talk will discuss some recent developments concerning Bernstein's inequality: inequalities with doubling weights, inequalities on general compact subsets of the real line or on a system of Jordan curves. The beautiful Szego-Schaake–van der Corput generalization will also be mentioned along with some of its recent variants.

We will prove a pointwise estimate for positive dyadic shifts of complexitym which is linear in the complexity. This can be used to give a pointwiseestimate for Calderon-Zygmund operators and to answer a question posed byA. Lerner. Several applications will be discussed.- This is joint work with Jose M. Conde-Alonso.

It is a well understood story that one can extract linkinvariants associated to simple Lie algebras. These invariants arecalled Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants and the famous Jones polynomialis the simplest example. Kauffman showed that the Jones polynomialcould be described very simply by replacing crossings in a knotdiagram by various smoothings. In this talk we will explainCautis-Kamnitzer-Licata's simple new approach to understanding theseinvariants using basic representation theory and the quantum Weylgroup action. Their approach is based on a version of Howe duality forexterior algebras called skew-Howe duality. Even the graphical (orskein theory) description of these invariants can be recovered in anelementary way from this data. The advantage of this approach isthat it suggests a `categorification' where knot homology theoriesarise in an elementary way from higher representation theory and thestructure of categorified quantum groups. Joint work with David Rose and Hoel Queffelec