Beginning Of Semester Party &  ...

Jan 23, 2026 Speaker :  Bahareh Baharinezhad

Affiliation:-  Binghamton  University 

Title:-  How to make a million dollars? (Or go broke trying to?) 

Abstract:- My talk focuses on the Nobel Prize–winning work on option pricing by Black and Scholes, with key contributions from Merton. The talk is motivated by a widely shared screenshot of an investor claiming to have turned a $400 investment into one million dollars. Using this example, we will address two central questions:

– How did the market maker on the other side of this trade remain in business?

– To what extent, if at all, can such outcomes be systematically replicated?

Jan 30, 2026 Speaker :  Chloé Postel-Vinay

Affiliation:-  U  Chicago 

Title:-  k-shuffle braid groups

Abstract:- Braid groups are known to arise as from many places, two of which are as the Garside group obtained from the poset of non-crossing partitions, and as the fundamental group of the space of square-free complex polynomials of degree n. The latter is a K(B_n,1) while the former can be used to build a CW-complex with nice combinatorial properties, which is also a K(B_n,1). In 2024, McCammond and Dougherty described explicitly the homotopy allowing to go from one to the other.

In this talk, we introduce a new family of groups called the k-shuffle braid groups. We will see how they arise in two similar contexts: first, we will look at certain families of non-crossing partitions and obtain a (metric) CW-complex following classical arguments from Garside theory for Artin groups. Second, from spaces of complex monic polynomials with a certain set of prescribed regular values. Both spaces also happen to be classifying spaces.

No prior knowledge about braid groups will be assumed.

Website :- sites.google.com/view/cpostelvinay 

Feb. 7, 2026 Speaker :   Miguel Alonso Izquierdo

Affiliation:-   Binghamton University 

Title:- TBA

Abstract:-  TBA

Feb. 13, 2026 Speaker :   Miri Son

Affiliation:-  Rice University

Title:-  TBA

Abstract:-  TBA