Calendar

This talk will be about refined curve counting on local P^2, the noncompact Calabi-Yau 3-fold total space of the canonical line bundle of the projective plane. I will explain how to construct quasimodular forms starting from Betti numbers of moduli spaces of dimension 1 coherent sheaves on P^2. This gives a proof of some stringy predictions about the refined topological string theory of local P^2 in the Nekrasov-Shatashvili limit. Partly based on work with Honglu Fan, Shuai Guo, and Longting Wu.

Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/96709211410?pwd=SHJyUUc4NzU5Y1d0N2FKVzIwcmEzdz09

TITLE: Isadore Singer’s Work on Analytic Torsion

ABSTRACT: I will review two famous papers of Ray and Singer on analytic torsion written approximately half a century ago. Then I will sketch the influence of analytic torsion in a variety of areas of physics including anomalies, topological field theory, and string theory.

Talk chair: Cumrun Vafa

Written articles will accompany each lecture in this series and be available as part of the publication “History and Literature of Mathematical Science.”

For more information, please visit the event page.

Register here to attend.

The space spanned by homotopy classes of free oriented loops on a 2-manifold carries an interesting algebraic structure (a Lie bialgebra structure) due to Goldman and Turaev. This structure is defined in terms of intersections and self-intersections of planar curves. In the talk, we will explain a surprising link between the Gaoldman-Turaev theory and the Kashiwara-Vergne problem on properties of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff series. Important tools in establishing this link are the non-commutative divergence cocycle and a novel characterization of conjugacy classes in free Lie algebras in terms of cyclic words. The talk is based on joint works with N. Kawazumi, Y. Kuno and F. Naef.

Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/779283357?pwd=MitXVm1pYUlJVzZqT3lwV2pCT1ZUQT09

The space spanned by homotopy classes of free oriented loops on a 2-manifold carries an interesting algebraic structure (a Lie bialgebra structure) due to Goldman and Turaev. This structure is defined in terms of intersections and self-intersections of planar curves. In the talk, we will explain a surprising link between the Gaoldman-Turaev theory and the Kashiwara-Vergne problem on properties of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff series. Important tools in establishing this link are the non-commutative divergence cocycle and a novel characterization of conjugacy classes in free Lie algebras in terms of cyclic words. The talk is based on joint works with N. Kawazumi, Y. Kuno and F. Naef.

Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/779283357?pwd=MitXVm1pYUlJVzZqT3lwV2pCT1ZUQT09

A core element in decision-making under uncertainty is the feedback on the quality of the performed actions. However, in many applications, such feedback is restricted. For example, in recommendation systems, repeatedly asking the user to provide feedback on the quality of recommendations will annoy them. In this work, we formalize decision-making problems with querying budget, where there is a (possibly time-dependent) hard limit on the number of reward queries allowed. Specifically, we consider multi-armed bandits, linear bandits, and reinforcement learning problems. We start by analyzing the performance of `greedy’ algorithms that query a reward whenever they can. We show that in fully stochastic settings, doing so performs surprisingly well, but in the presence of any adversity, this might lead to linear regret. To overcome this issue, we propose the Confidence-Budget Matching (CBM) principle that queries rewards when the confidence intervals are wider than the inverse square root of the available budget. We analyze the performance of CBM based algorithms in different settings and show that they perform well in the presence of adversity in the contexts, initial states, and budgets.

Joint work with Yonathan Efroni, Aadirupa Saha and Shie Mannor.

Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/98231541450