Applied Mathematics seminars

Marcos Petrúcio Cavalcante connects geometric stability to physical examples involving soap films, bubbles and vibrating membranes. He first describes his route through differential geometry and the development of a research group and graduate programme in Maceió, Brazil. The scientific discussion concerns shapes that are critical points of a functional. Its second variation defines stability, while the Morse index counts independent directions of improvement. Through examples and pictures, the talk explains why stable configurations tend to have simple geometry and topology. Two results make this principle precise: a genus-dependent lower bound on the Morse index of compact constant-mean-curvature surfaces in Euclidean space, and a rigidity theorem for stable extremal domains of the first Dirichlet eigenvalue on the round sphere.

Ivo D. Dinov examines augmented intelligence as a partnership between people and computational systems. The talk traces the technical and philosophical development of neural networks, then introduces complex-time, or kime, representations and the inference methods they support. Applications include medical imaging, healthcare and economic forecasting. It also considers the academic mission, societal consequences of AI and tensions between rapid technical development and human values, framing mathematical AI methods as extensions of human reasoning. Free hybrid seminar hosted by Wayne State University's Institute for AI and Data Science, AIDaS: CAD Seminar Series. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 14:30–15:30 EDT (America/Detroit; UTC−4). Attend in Room 1146, Faculty/Administration Building, 656 W. Kirby, Detroit, MI 48202, USA, or use the Zoom link on the official event page. Researchers, practitioners, students and faculty are welcome; the organizer encourages in-person attendance.

Two-lecture series by Mohammed Abouzaid (Stanford): 'Framed bordism and nearby Lagrangians' (September 16) and 'Complex bordism and Hamiltonian fibrations' (September 17), on bordism-theoretic approaches to Lagrangian embeddings in symplectic manifolds and Arnold's nearby Lagrangian conjecture.

Kirk Public Lecture at the Isaac Newton Institute by Yoshiko Ogata (Kyoto University) on how macroscopic properties of matter emerge from quantum particle interactions and the classification of topological order from an operator-algebraic perspective in mathematical physics.

Robert E. Gompf (University of Texas, Austin) lectures on 'On classifying smoothings of R^4 - from the beginning to the present', tracing how 4-manifold topology emerged from the breakthroughs of Freedman and Donaldson and how Euclidean 4-space admits exotic smoothings that resist classification by countable numerical invariants.

Isaac Newton Institute seminar in the 'Mathematics of many-body entanglement' (MMB) programme: Ignacio Cirac of the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik speaks on the preparation of tensor network states.