Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Burgers turbulence is the study of Burgers equation with random initial data or forcing. While having its origins in hydrodynamics, this model has remarkable connections to a variety of seemingly unrelated problems in statistics, kinetic theory, random matrices, and integrable systems. In this talk I will survey these connections and discuss the crucial role that exact solutions have played in the development of the theory.

We present a simple model of diffusions coupled through their drifts in a way that each component mean-reverts to the mean of the ensemble. In particular, we are interested in the number of components reaching a "default" level in a given time. This coupling creates stability of the system in the sense that there is a large probability of "nearly no default". However, we show that this "swarming" behavior also creates a small probability that a large number of components default corresponding to a "systemic risk event". The goal is to illustrate systemic risk with a toy model of lending and borrowing banks, using mean-field limit and large deviation estimates for a simple linear model. In the last part of the talk we will show some recent work with Rene Carmona on a "Mean Field Game" version of the previous model and the effects of the game on stability and systemic risk.

Contact geometry is a beautiful subject that has important interactions with topology in dimension three. In this talk I will give a brief introduction to contact geometry and discuss its interactions with Riemannian geometry. In particular I will discuss a contact geometry analog of the famous sphere theorem and more generally indicate how the curvature of a Riemannian metric can influence properties of a contact structure adapted to it.