Distinguished Mathematicians of Color Colloquium Series

The Distinguished Mathematicians of Color Colloquium highlights and promotes the work and achievements of people of color in research mathematics. It runs every semester.

The colloquium is typically an hour long, and should be accessible to a general mathematical audience. We encourage the colloquium to be undergraduate-accessible, if possible.

MOCAT also hosts "pizza seminars" the week before to give undergraduates and graduates a gentle introduction to the subject of the colloquium.

April 5th, 2021 from 4-5pm

Dr. Anthony Várilly-Alvarado of Rice University

Title: Perfect Cuboids and Magic Squares of Squares

Abstract: A perfect cuboid is a box such that the distance between any two corners is a positive integer. A magic square is a grid filled with distinct positive integers, whose rows, columns, and diagonals add up to the same number. To date, we don't know if there exists a perfect cuboid, or a 3 x 3 magic square whose entries are distinct squares. What do these problems have in common? Secretly, they are both problems about rational points on algebraic surfaces of general type. I believe there is no such thing as a perfect cuboid or a 3 x 3 magic square of squares, and I will try to convince you that geometry suggests this is so.

April 8th, 2021 from 3:30-5pm (Geometry Seminar Talk)

Dr. Anthony Várilly-Alvarado of Rice University

Title: Level structures on K3 surfaces: hopes and dreams

Abstract: K3 surfaces are surfaces of "intermediate type"; they have a rich geometry, and their number theory is slowly starting to come into focus. In this talk I will survey results and conjectures that point towards the idea that there is an effective algorithm to determine if a K3 surface over Q has a rational point or not.

November 5th, 2020 from 4:30-5:30pm

Dr. Wilfrid Gangbo of UCLA

Title: Well-posedness and regularity for an $H^1$-projection problem

Abstract: We prove the existence, uniqueness, and regularity of minimizers of a polyconvex functional which corresponds to the $H^1$-projection of measure-preserving maps. Our result introduces a new criteria on the uniqueness of the minimizer, based on the smallness of the Lagrange multiplier. No estimate on the second derivatives of the pressure is needed to get a unique global minimizer. (This talk is based on a joint work with M. Jacobs and I. Kim).