Tag: IGERT

Brandeis IGERT Summer Institute Scheduled for June 25-28

The Brandeis IGERT program in “Geometry and Dynamics” is holding its Summer Institute from June 25-28. This is a series of lectures aimed at graduate students on the mathematical & theoretical side of the sciences, on a broad spectrum of topics — of course, postdocs, faculty, and sufficiently advanced undergraduates should enjoy these as well.

Once again we have an excellent list of speakers from inside and outside of Brandeis, on subjects including quantum computing, blockchain technology, origami, and the carbon cycle and mass extinction.  A full schedule is available. All are welcome and coffee and lunch will be provided: please RSVP here or by selecting the button at the bottom of the schedule page, so that we have an accurate headcount.

We hope to see you there!

IGERT Summer Institute – July 27 to August 7, 2015

IGERTBrandeis is hosting a two-week summer institute for graduate students in the mathematical sciences from July 27-August 7.  This will combine the annual summer institute of Brandeis’ Geometry and Dynamics IGERT program, with a sequel to the US-India Advanced Studies Institute on thermalization, held two years ago in Bangalore.

Topics:

  • Large deviation theory
  • Statistics of extreme events
  • The large N expansion in statistical and quantum physics
  • Statistical fluid dynamics
  • Quantum information and quantum gravity
  • Thermalization in Quantum Systems

Lecturers:

Sumit Das (U. Kentucky)
Chandan Dasgupta (IISC, Bangalore)
Rajesh Gopakumar (HRI, Allahabad and ICTS)
Alex Maloney (McGill University)
Satya Majumdar (LPTMS, Paris)
Sanjib Sabhapandit (Raman Research Institute, Bangalore)
Peter Weichman (BAE systems)

Organizers:

Albion Lawrence
Bulbul Chakraborty

Registration:

There will be no registration fee, but the venue will have limited capacity, so interested students should register by sending an email to Catherine Broderick (cbroderi@brandeis.edu) by July 4. Please list your affiliation, your year in graduate school, any publications, and the name of your PhD advisor.

Additional information can be found at www.brandeis.edu/igert/.

Brandeis IGERT Summer Institute June 16 – June 26, 2014

The second Brandeis IGERT Summer Institute begins this Monday, June 16th in Goldsmith 300 and runs through Thursday, June 26th. This will consist of a variety of talks by faculty and students on subjects in the mathematical sciences. While this is part of the IGERT training program, aimed at graduate students working across the spectrum of the mathematical sciences, we invite the Brandeis community to attend any of the talks that catch their eye. Speakers include:

  • Chris Santangelo (U Mass Amherst)– “Shape and mechanics of origami folding”
  • Matthew Headrick — “Introduction of quantum information theory”
  • Bulbul Chakraborty and Blake Lebaron — “Applications of Statistical Mechanics to Finance”
  • Daniel Ruberman — “Introduction to Knot Theory”
  • Paul Miller — “Feedback control in neural firing”
  • Albion Lawrence — “An introduction to inflation and gravity waves”
  • Eli Putzig — TBA
  • Honi Sanders — TBA
  • Tony Ng — TBA

and a schedule can be found at http://www.brandeis.edu/igert/calendar/index.html  or in the Brandeis Science Seminars listings.

We will be having lunch in the Volen bridge; please bring your own and join us!

New team-taught course offered spring 2014: “Differential geometry in classical and quantum mechanics”

1) Introduction and Motivation

We would like to call attention to a new class offered this winter/spring 2014 quarter, being taught jointly by Prof. Daniel Ruberman in Mathematics and Prof. Albion Lawrence in Physics.  This is being listed jointly as Physics 202a (Quantum Field Theory) and Math 221b (Topics in Topology).  It is being team-taught under the auspices of the Brandeis Geometry and Dynamics IGERT program.

This course aims to introduce basic notions of fiber bundles and connections on them, and their application to basic physical examples in classical and quantum mechanics: especially the mechanics of deformable bodies, and Berry’s phase.  The target audience is mathematics and physics students, and mathematically inclined students in physical chemistry, neuroscience, computer science, and economics.  The essential principles here find applications to chemical and neural oscillators and control theory; there have even been suggestions that it is a useful language for describing currency trading.

The mathematics covered here typically appears in advanced courses on quantum and statistical field theory.  However, it has much broader applicability, and the instructors felt that studying more elementary physics examples better highlighted the essential mathematics and lead to a broader perspective that would better prepare students to find new and creative uses for the mathematics.  Furthermore, they allow us to teach a broader audience, as the essential physics background is straightforward and can be explained without the student needing two years of graduate-level physics courses.

This course is essentially a graduate course, but it is certainly appropriate for senior undergraduates with a solid mathematical background (math and physics majors especially).  The modern mathematical language of manifolds and vector bundles will be introduced and used throughout, but with reference to physical and geometric notions.  This will provide physics students with an appropriate vocabulary for further study, while mathematics students can try to grasp the intuition behind the formalism.  Note that the course satisfies one of the IGERT course requirements; however, we strongly encourage non-IGERT students to enroll.

The course is scheduled to take place Mondays and Wednesdays from 2-3:20pm. Continue reading “New team-taught course offered spring 2014: “Differential geometry in classical and quantum mechanics””

Thermalization From Glasses to Black Holes

bangalore2Textbook thermodynamics treats equilibrium states of large systems, in which macroscopic variables (temperature, pressure and so on) remain static, and how small perturbations of such systems relax with time.  There have been a number of exciting recent developments in studying (a) how such equilibrium states are reached in a closed quantum or classical system, and (b) generalizations of thermodynamics to small systems and to systems that are intrinsically out of equilibrium.  This work spans both classical and quantum mechanics, and ties together biological systems, soft matter (such as glasses and granular systems), quantum matter, nuclear physics, quantum information, quantum gravity, and string theory.
This is clearly an area of inquiry in which contact between these different fields will lead to important advances, much as contact between condensed matter and particle physics did for the study of symmetry breaking (the source of multiple Nobel prizes, including this year’s and of the renormalization group.  We (Brandeis Physics  faculty Aparna Baskaran, Bulbul Chakraborty, Matthew Headrick, and Albion Lawrence) felt that an ideal way to promote this was to put together an intensive series of pedagogical lectures covering recent results in the aforementioned fields.  With the encouragement of the National Science Foundation (due in large part to Brandeis’s IGERT program in Geometry and Dynamics  we took advantage of our deep contacts with the Indian physics community to put together an Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) on thermalization, under the auspices of the new International Center for the Theoretical Sciences (ICTS)  in Bangalore, and co-organized by Chandan Dasgupta  (Indian Institute of Science), Gautam Mandal (TIFR, Mumbai), Sanjib Sabhapandit  (Raman Research Institute and ICTS), and Krishnendu Sengupta  (IACS , Kolkata).
The school was extremely successful, with beautiful lectures on cutting-edge physics from the leading experts in their respective areas.  We recommend these lectures highly to those interested in these subjects.  Links to the lecture notes, and to some related review articles, can be found here:
and there is a YouTube channel for the lectures here:

Quantum Field Theory: An Interdisciplinary Study Group

William Hicks, a grad student in Physics, writes:

    This semester, graduate students from a wide range of departments will be coming together to study quantum field theory (QFT) as part of the interdisciplinary IGERT program. QFT is a subject whose mathematical underpinnings crop up in a wide range of seemingly unrelated fields, and the study group hopes to take advantage of the varied backgrounds of its members. Mathematicians in the group can help provide mathematical rigor, while physicists can help supply the physical intuition for many of the otherwise abstruse corners of the subject.  Students from other disciplines will be able to broaden the discussion by showing how some of the techniques discussed also show up in their fields.

The study group will meet from noon to 1:00 every Wednesday in Goldsmith 226. All are welcome!

IGERT Summer Institute

 The Brandeis IGERT program is hosting its first summer institute starting Wednesday, July 31 and running weekdays through Friday, August 9. This will be a series of lectures by experts inside and outside of Brandeis, together with some student seminars, aimed at graduate students across the sciences, especially (but not exclusively!) those doing theoretical work.

The lectures will run from 9:30-4 every day, with coffee at 9am, and ample time between lectures for questions and conversations.  They will be held in room 055 of the Lemberg Academic Center (note that Domenic’s will be open at that time, so lunch is available nearby).  Those interested in attending should RSVP to Tony Bottaro (bottaro@brandeis.edu) so that we can get a head count for coffee.

The lecturers are:

Parongama Sen (University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India), lecturing on applications of statistical physics to social science problems.
Henry Cohn (Microsoft Research, New England), lecturing on symmetry and optimization.
Ben Allen (Emmanuel College and Harvard), lecturing on evolutionary dynamics
Paul Miller (Brandeis), lecturing on aspects of theoretical neuroscience.
Blake LeBaron (Brandeis), lecturing on empirical puzzles in financial data, and applications of agent-based modeling.
Albion Lawrence (Brandeis), lecturing on fiber bundles (“gauge theory”) and their applications to deformable bodies (falling cats, swimming bacteria).

In addition, we will have seminars by IGERT students:

Sumantra Sarkar
Blake Stacey
Daniel Goldstein

and a schedule can be found on this webpage:

http://www.brandeis.edu/igert/calendar/index.html

IGERT Video Poster Competition Voting Open

Tony Ng (a grad student in Paul Miller’s lab in Neuroscience) writes:

I’m entering a nationwide video/poster competition organized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the IGERT program.  There are over 100 three-minute-videos/posters in the competition.  The videos/posters are divided into 18 fields, all of which are multidisciplinary.  Mine covers cognition/biology/physics.

The competition has a Public Choice award.  Winning the award requires Facebook “likes” on my page.  I need on the order ~1000 “likes” to be in contention.  The bar has been raised from last year’s.  The competition is fierce.  Each/every vote from the Brandeis community counts!

The competition opens today (5/21) and ends Thursday (5/23) at 10pm.  For a vote to count, it is imperative to click on the “Public Choice” button, which would then trigger a Facebook “like” sign-in.  Anyone with an existing Facebook account can contribute.

Here’s the link to my 3-minute video/poster:

http://posterhall.org/igert2013/posters/402

Act now! Tthe competition closes on Thursday at 10pm!

Hope you enjoy the videos!

Update (2 pm):

Andrew Russell from the Petsko-Ringe lab also has a poster in the competition on studying Aβ oligomers to understand Alzheimer’s Disease – check it out — vote early, vote often?

http://posterhall.org/igert2013/posters/416

Video Poster: One Dimensional Rings of Coupled Oscillators

Brandeis Physics grad students (IGERT trainees) Michael Giver and Nathan Tompkins have a “video poster” in the NSF IGERT Video & Poster Competition on “One Dimensional Rings of Coupled Oscillators – Turing’s Theory Realized”. You can check out and comment on their poster on-line at http://posterhall.org/igert2012/posters/244.

award ribbonUpdate: Michael and Nathan’s poster received a Judge’s Choice award ($2,000.00) in the competition!

Geometry and Dynamics IGERT Awarded

Brandeis has just been awarded an NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) grant in the mathematical sciences.  The grant, titled Geometry and Dynamics: integrated education in the mathematical sciences, is designed to foster interdisciplinary research and education by and for graduate students across the mathematical and theoretical sciences, including chemistry, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.  It is structured around a number of themes common to these disciplines: complex dynamical systems, stochastic processes, quantum and statistical field theory; and geometry and topology. We believe that it is the first IGERT awarded for the theoretical (as opposed to laboratory) sciences, and are very excited about what we believe to be a highly novel program which will cement existing interdepartmental relationships and encourage exciting new collaborations in the mathematical sciences, including collaborations between the natural sciences and the International Business School (IBS).

The resolution of a singularity that develops along Ricci flow, understood mathematically by Grigori Perelman.  If the red manifold represents the target space of a string, it is conjectured that the corresponding two-dimensonal field theory describing the string undergoes confinement and develops a mass gap for the degrees of freedom corresponding to the singular regime.

The award, for $2,867,668 spread out over five years, provides funds for graduate student stipends, travel, seminar speakers, and interdisciplinary course development.  It contains activities and research opportunities in partnership with the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) in Cambridge, MA.  It also provides opportunities for research internships at the International Center for the Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore.

The PIs on the grant are: Bulbul Chakraborty (Physics); Albion Lawrence (Physics: lead PI); Blake LeBaron (IBS); Paul Miller (Neuroscience); and Daniel Ruberman (Mathematics).  There are 11 additional affiliated Brandeis faculty across biology, chemistry, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and psychology.  Contact Albion Lawrence (albion@brandeis.edu) for more information about the program.

Arrays of repulsively coupled Kuramoto oscillators on a triangular lattice organize into domains with opposite helicities in which phases of any three neighboring oscillators either increase or decrease in a given direction. Fig. (a) illustrates these two helicities in which cyan, ma- genta and blue vary in opposite directions. In Fig. (b), white and green regions represent domains of opposite helicities. The red regions indicate the frequency entrained oscillators, which are predominantly seen in the interior of the domains.

Admission to the program is handled through the Ph.D programs in the various disciplines: