TMC Distinguished Lecture Series
Organized by The (Indian) Mathematics Consortium

Co-hosted by IIT Bombay and ICTS, Bangalore

The Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS) is an initiative of the (Indian) Mathematics Consortium (TMC) and it aims to host virtual colloquiums by some of the best researchers and expositors around the world. The speakers are carefully chosen by the Scientific Committee among mathematicians who are not only distinguished researchers, but also known for the quality of their exposition. The principal aim is to make the talks as widely accessible as possible, especially to Ph.D. students. With this in view, the format of most of the talks will be as follows:

  • First, a pre-recorded talk by the speaker will be posted online. Interested audience can view this at their leisure and communicate questions, if there are any, to the organizers.

  • A live interactive session between the speaker and interested participants will be held in about 2 weeks after posting the online talk. This will be chaired by a member of the Scientific Committee.

The approximate duration of the talk will be about 45 minutes and that of the interactive session will be about 30 minutes. However, this is not rigid. The interactive sessions will not be recorded.

To receive announcements about upcoming colloquia and the Zoom links for interactive sessions, please register at the homepage of the TMC DLS.

Past colloquia
Pandemics and paradox
Scott Sheffield (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Video release:
10 February 2021, 18:00
Interactive session:
24 February 2021, 18:00 to 18:45
Virtual colloquium

In one of the simplest epidemic models, one lets p_n denote the number of new infections during week n and assumes that (during the early stages of the epidemic) p_{n+1} = R_0 p_n c_n where c_n measures the “fraction of usual contact” that takes place between people during the nth w...more

Stability, non-approximate groups, and high dimensional expanders
Prof. Alex Lubotzky (Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University)
Video release:
13 January 2021, 18:00
Interactive session:
27 January 2021, 18:00 to 18:45
Virtual colloquium

Several well-known open questions (such as: are all groups sofic or hyperlinear?) have a common form: can all groups be approximated by asymptotic homomorphisms into the symmetric groups Sym(n) (in the sofic case) or the unitary groups U(n) ( in the hyperlinear case )?

Uncertainty principle and uncertainty inequalities
Prof. Nalini Anantharaman (University of Strasbourg)
Video release:
09 December 2020, 18:00
Interactive session:
22 December 2020, 18:00 to 18:45
Virtual colloquium

We shall discuss mathematical forms of the uncertainty principle and its relationship with quantum unique ergodicity.

...more
3264 Conics in a Second
Prof. Bernd Sturmfels (Max Planck Institute, Leipzig and University of California, Berkeley)
Video release:
18 November 2020, 18:00
Interactive session:
07 December 2020, 18:00 to 18:45
Virtual colloquium

This seminar spans a bridge between 19th century geometry to 21st century computing. We start with a classical theme that was featured in the January 2020 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, namely the 3264 conics that are tangent to five given conics in the plane. We discu...more

Harish-Chandra tempered representations and homogeneous spaces
Prof. Yves Benoist (University of Paris-Saclay)
Video release:
28 October 2020, 18:00
Interactive session:
11 November 2020, 18:00 to 18:45
Virtual colloquium

In the seventies Harish-Chandra introduced the tempered representations of a semisimple real Lie group G as those that occur in the analog on G of the Fourier-Plancherel formula. Nowadays, those representations are ubiquitous.

In this talk we will recall their defini...more