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Special Colloquium: Generating families revisited

COLLOQUIUMS: OTHER COLLOQUIUMS

When: February 3, 2025
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Where: Science Center 507
Address: 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
Speaker: Hiro Lee Tanaka - Texas State University

Here are two facts — about differentiable functions — they don’t teach us in calculus. (I) Functions encode interesting recipes for making spaces. (II) Families of critical points create interesting shapes. These facts manifest some of my favorite phenomena in math, so I’ll start by explaining the mechanisms behind them. Then, I’ll approach ongoing research aimed at understanding the interface between (I) and (II). In particular, I’ll state how recent work with Lisa Traynor can, in infinitely many examples, distinguish families of functions that could not be distinguished before. All this forms a first step in a larger project. If there is time, I’ll explain the project and how there is plenty of room for contributions from mathematicians at all levels.


There will be a reception in the Math Common Room, Science Center, 4th Floor, at 5:00 pm following the talk.