Department of

# Mathematics

Seminar Calendar
for events the day of Wednesday, February 1, 2017.

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events for the
events containing

Questions regarding events or the calendar should be directed to Tori Corkery.
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Wednesday, February 1, 2017

3:00 pm in 243 Altgeld Hall,Wednesday, February 1, 2017

#### Modular forms, quantum field theory, and algebraic topology

###### Dan Berwick-Evans (UIUC)

Abstract: Modular forms appear in a wide variety of contexts. For example, they arise in physics as partition functions of two dimensional quantum field theories and in algebraic topology as the coefficient ring of elliptic cohomology. A long-standing conjecture suggests that these two appearances of modular forms are related. After explaining the ingredients, I’ll describe some recent progress.

4:00 pm in 245 Altgeld Hall,Wednesday, February 1, 2017

#### Application of Stein's method in Spin Glass Systems

###### Tayyab Nawaz (UIUC Math)

Abstract: In 1960’s, Stein introduced a method to bound the distance between two probability distributions using a specific probability metric. For a large complex stochastic system, mean field theory is considered as a starting point to study its physical properties. In mean field theory we assume that each particle interacts with the rest of the system in a homogeneous 'average' way. In this talk, I will discuss how Stein’s method and mean field theory are used to study the energy minimization problem for spin-glass models in statistical mechanics. I will also discuss the idea of optimal Monte Carlo algorithms for solving energy minimization problem and related open problems.