University at Albany, SUNY

Tomorrow (Wednesday Jan 20th) at 11am, Noah Giansiracusa will speak on "Looking for Geometry in the Supreme Court" in the Applied Algebraic Topology Research Network seminar. Follow the instructions here to get a Zoom link to go! Title and abstract listed below. https://topology.ima.umn.edu/seminars Title: "Looking for Geometry in the Supreme Court"... Abstract: Empirical legal studies is the corner of political science that uses data to better understand various aspects of the court system. The voting behavior of the 9 judges on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court has been a topic of significant interest among scholars---largely because the decisions they reach are so influential, but also because there are careful, partially quantitative records of every case at that level. Most of the academic work on this is statistical or game-theoretic, but recently there have been investigations rooted in planar geometry and phylogenetic trees. In this talk I'll explain the context of the main problems here, report on the geometric approaches that have been taken, and suggest further directions scholars could take this line of work in that push it deeper into topology and geometry.

Sometimes people think that math is all about equations and numbers, but this recent map of mathematics shows that aside from numbers, there are two other fundamental starting points or "seeds" for mathematics: shape and change, which corresponds to geometry/topology and analysis/dynamical systems. UAlbany's math department has experts in all these areas. Click through this fantastic Quanta article to learn more about the mathematical landscape! https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-map-of-mathematics-2020/

https://www.sciencenews.org//how-julia-robinson-helped-def

A seemingly simple problem is not so simple! https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-solves-centuri

This Friday at 2pm, Simon Cho will speak in the Workshop on Topology: Identifying Order in Complex Systems via Zoom. Please join [email protected] to get the zoom link. Title: "PARAMETERS IN INDEXED HOMOLOGY"... Abstract: Motivated by thematic similarities between persistent homology and magnitude homology, we describe a simplicial construction associated to a metric space. This construction is determined by (apart from the metric space itself) a choice of two parameters, which we may take to be real-valued. Applying homology pointwise, we get persistent homology on one end of the possible choices of parameters, and magnitude homology on the opposite end. Time permitting, we describe some modest applications of this perspective.