Planned seminars

07/12/2021, Tuesday, 16:30–17:30 Europe/Lisbon — Online

Ciprian Manolescu, Stanford University

A well-known strategy to disprove the smooth 4D Poincare conjecture is to find a knot that bounds a disk in a homotopy 4-ball but not in the standard 4-ball. Freedman, Gompf, Morrison and Walker suggested that Rasmussen’s invariant from Khovanov homology could be useful for this purpose. I will describe three recent results about this strategy: that it fails for Gluck twists (joint work with Marengon, Sarkar and Willis); that an analogue works for other 4-manifolds (joint work with Marengon and Piccirillo); and that 0-surgery homeomorphisms provide a large class of potential examples (joint work with Piccirillo).

21/12/2021, Tuesday, 16:30–17:30 Europe/Lisbon — Online

Eva Miranda, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

The dynamics of an inviscid and incompressible fluid flow on a Riemannian manifold is governed by the Euler equations. Recently, Tao [6, 7, 8] launched a programme to address the global existence problem for the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations based on the concept of universality. Inspired by this proposal, we show that the stationary Euler equations exhibit several universality features, in the sense that, any non-autonomous flow on a compact manifold can be extended to a smooth stationary solution of the Euler equations on some Riemannian manifold of possibly higher dimension [1].

A key point in the proof is looking at the h-principle in contact geometry through a contact mirror, unveiled by Etnyre and Ghrist in [4] more than two decades ago. We end this talk addressing a question raised by Moore in [5] : “Is hydrodynamics capable of performing computations?”. The universality result above yields the Turing completeness of the steady Euler flows on a 17-dimensional sphere. Can this result be improved? In [2] we construct a Turing complete steady Euler flow in dimension 3. Time permitting, we discuss this and other generalizations for t-dependent Euler flows contained in [3].

In all the constructions above, the metric is seen as an additional "variable" and thus the method of proof does not work if the metric is prescribed.

Is it still possible to construct a Turing complete Euler flow on a 3-dimensional space with the standard metric? Yes, see our recent preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03559 (joint with Cardona and Peralta).

This talk is based on several joint works with Cardona, Peralta-Salas and Presas.

[1] R. Cardona, E. Miranda, D. Peralta-Salas, F. Presas. Universality of Euler flows and flexibility of Reeb embeddings, arXiv:1911.01963.
[2] R. Cardona, E. Miranda, D. Peralta-Salas, F. Presas. Constructing Turing complete Euler flows in dimension 3. PNAS May 11, 2021 118 (19) e2026818118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026818118.
[3] R. Cardona, E. Miranda and D. Peralta-Salas, Turing universality of the incompressible Euler equations and a conjecture of Moore, International Mathematics Research Notices, rnab233, https://doi.org/10.1093/imrn/rnab233
[4] J. Etnyre, R. Ghrist. Contact topology and hydrodynamics I. Beltrami fields and the Seifert conjecture. Nonlinearity 13 (2000) 441–458.
[5] C. Moore. Generalized shifts: unpredictability and undecidability in dynamical systems. Nonlinearity 4 (1991) 199–230.
[6] T. Tao. On the universality of potential well dynamics. Dyn. PDE 14 (2017) 219–238.
[7] T. Tao. On the universality of the incompressible Euler equation on compact manifolds. Discrete Cont. Dyn. Sys. A 38 (2018) 1553–1565.
[8] T. Tao. Searching for singularities in the Navier-Stokes equations. Nature Rev. Phys. 1 (2019) 418–419.

04/01/2022, Tuesday, 16:30–17:30 Europe/Lisbon — Online

Christian Pauly, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis
To be announced

11/01/2022, Tuesday, 16:30–17:30 Europe/Lisbon — Online

Lars Sektnan, University of Gothenburg
To be announced

01/02/2022, Tuesday, 16:30–17:30 Europe/Lisbon — Online

Richard Hind, University of Notre Dame
To be announced

08/02/2022, Tuesday, 16:30–17:30 Europe/Lisbon — Online

Jonny Evans, University of Lancaster

(Joint with Y. Lekili) If someone gives you a variety with a singular point, you can try and get some understanding of what the singularity looks like by taking its “link”, that is you take the boundary of a neighbourhood of the singular point. For example, the link of the complex plane curve with a cusp $y^2 = x^3$ is a trefoil knot in the 3-sphere. I want to talk about the links of a class of 3-fold singularities which come up in Mori theory: the compound Du Val (cDV) singularities. These links are 5-dimensional manifolds. It turns out that many cDV singularities have the same 5-manifold as their link, and to tell them apart you need to keep track of some extra structure (a contact structure). We use symplectic cohomology to distinguish the contact structures on many of these links.