CoolStuff Seminar

Invented on May 18th, 2007 (by Oleg Ivrii and Zavosh Amir-Khosravi) a "rigorous" defintion of CoolStuff is against our philosophy, so I will only give some guidelines what qualifies stuff to be cool:

  • The process of CoolStuff is to learn mathematics by application. Here at CoolStuff, we believe that to understand a subject is to see it used in action.
  • By its nature, it is elementary, simple, elegant and intuitive. Sometimes, it could even be accessible to highschool students if it did not use a simple fact from topology or abstract algebra. Nevertheless, CoolStuff benefits from its highly intelligent audience.
  • CoolStuff does not belong to a single subject, it draws from all of mathematics. By its nature, it cannot be found in a university classroom, which tries to partition all of mathematics into "subjects".
  • CoolStuff should be able to stand by itself as a final result, with no applications in mind (even though, applications make it even more cool).
  • When it is a well-known theory, the focus is on showing examples rather than dunking theorems one by one.

Of course, classical university education has its merits too :-).

CoolStuff is now organized by Yuri Burda. Contact (in person, or by email) if you are interested in giving a talk.

Previous CoolStuff Seminars can be found at the following link: http://www.math.toronto.edu/oleg/css/coolstuff.html

Details

Quasiconformal Distortion

by Oleg Ivrii  (www) | Harvard University
Time: 11:00  (Thursday, Jan. 07, 2010)
Location: BA6180, Bahen Center, 40 St. George Street
Abstract:
To understand a map, one should see how it distorts objects - their shape, area and dimension. I will begin by giving a few examples of maps which are almost conformal, but not - they are called quasiconformal. I will outline some of their basic properties and then discuss Astala's 1994 result of how they distort area and dimension. Then, I will say a few words about more recent results dealing with Hausdorff measures, quasi-circles and the BMO analytic capacity.

Dates in this series

· Thursday, Jan. 07, 2010: Quasiconformal Distortion (Oleg Ivrii)
· Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010: An introduction to combinatorial species (Brad Hannigan-Daley)
· Thursday, Feb. 04, 2010: Flipping functions: bundlish things and their classifying gadgets (Omar Antolín Camarena)
· Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010: The ADHM Construction of Instantons (Jonathan Fisher)
· Thursday, Mar. 25, 2010: Ruler and Compass Constructions for Cheapskates (Omar Antolín Camarena)
· Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011: Blaschke Worlds (Oleg Ivrii)
· Thursday, Apr. 28, 2011: Blaschke Worlds (Oleg Ivrii)