Title: The History of Equal Temperament Tuning: How some pesky irrational numbers ruined music for 2000 years
Abstract: Why are there exactly twelve notes in the Western musical scale? How big is the space between the successive notes? What even is sound? These are some of the questions I will be answering in tomorrow's GIST talk. I will discuss a brief history of the math behind assigning pitch names like B flat to certain sound wave frequencies. We'll talk about how the assignment works today, how it has changed over time, and what impact adjusting the assignment has had on the development of more modern musical genres. No musical background required! Just bring your lovely selves!
Title: Fano Varieties and K-Stability
Abstract: The introduction of K-Stability in algebraic geometry has led to many massive breakthroughs. After Yau proved the Calabi conjecture for canonically-polarised and, what are now called Calabi-Yau manifolds, the case for Fanos remained unsolved for over 40 years. There was some obstruction for Fano varieties admitting a certain nice class of metric. After decades of work, the obstruction was found to be K-Stability. In this talk, we will focus on understanding what all this means, with no background in algebraic geometry assumed
Title: Intersection vs length: a tale of two perspectives on surfaces
Abstract: One of my favorite things about low dimensions (1,2,3, or (maybe) 4) is the interplay between the geometric and topological structures. Unfortunately, this interplay can be a bit of a bear to understand at first glance; knowing when a property is "geometric" versus "topological" can be tricky. However, on certain nice types of surfaces we have a nice relation between lengths of curves, which is as geometric as you can get, and intersections (which are very topological, once defined properly). The other fascinating aspect of this result is that the connecting tissue is some technology from ergodic theory. This talk should be accessible to anyone who knows what the vibes for continuous functions are and what a metric space is. In particular, no measure theory, ergodic theory, or knowledge of the word "hyperbolic" will be needed.
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