| Archived Summer Tutorials: | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 |
Welcome Message
The summer tutorial program offers some interesting mathematics to those
of you who will be in the Boston area during July and August. Each
tutorial will run for six weeks, meeting twice or three times per week
in the evenings (so as not to interfere with day time jobs). The
tutorials will start early in July or late in June, and run to mid
August. The precise starting dates and meeting times will be arranged
for the convenience of the participants once the tutorial rosters are
set.
The format will be much like that of the term-time tutorials, with the
tutorial leader lecturing in the first few meetings and students
presenting later on. Unlike the term-time tutorials, the summer
tutorials have no official Harvard status: you will not receive either
Harvard or concentration credit for them. Moreover, enrollment in the
tutorial does not qualify you for any Harvard-related perks (such as a
place to live). However, the Math Department will pay each Harvard
College student participant a stipend of approximately , and you can
hand in your final paper from the tutorial for you junior paper
requirement for the Math Concentration.
The topics and leaders of the four tutorials this summer are:
A description of each topic is appended below. You can sign up for a
tutorial only by emailing me at [email protected]. When you
sign up, please list at least one other choice, if possible, in case
your preferred tutorial is either over-subscribed or under-subscribed.
Places are filled on a first-come, first-served basis, but with
priority being given to math concentrators. In the past, some
tutorials have filled up quickly.
If you have further questions about any given topic, contact the
tutorial leader via email. Please contact me if you have questions
about the administration of the tutorials.
Yours,
Peter Kronheimer
Introduction to Ergodic Theory, by Hansheng Diao ([email protected])
A dynamical system is a mathematical object intended to capture the idea
of a "systems" in the real world that passes through
different possible "states" as time passes. More
precisely, a dynamical system consists of some set X of possible states
and a transformation T from X to X specifying the movement of the
system from one state to the next.
Ergodic theory is the qualitative study of the measure-preserving
dynamical systems; especially, the study of the behavior of a dynamical
system after running the system for a long time. The main results are
summarized by various ergodic theorems. The ergodic theorems assert
that, under certain conditions, the time average of a function along the
trajectories exists almost everywhere and is related to the space
average. In particular, when the dynamical system is ergodic, the time
average is the same for almost all initial points. In other words, the
system "forgets" the initial condition after a long time.
The concept of ergodicity plays a central role in the development of
ergodic theory. Roughly speaking, the word "ergodic"
means the transformation mixes the space very well. Similarly, there are
notions of mixing and weakly mixing, corresponding to better mixed
systems. Lots of applications of ergodic theory amounts to show the
"well-mixed-ness" of the systems.
Ergodic theory has fruitful connections to many different aspects of
mathematics. For example, ergodic theory has been adopted to study
geodesic flow on Riemannian manifolds. Applications of ergodic
theory also shows up in harmonic analysis, Lie theory, probability
theory, differential geometry, and even number theory! Recent progresses
include Elon Lindenstrauss's proof of Arithmetic Quantum
Ergodicity Conjecture and Terrence Tao and Ben Green's proof of
arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes.
Reference: Any introductory textbook on Ergodic theory works. I recommend:
- Manfred Einsiedler and Thomas Ward: Ergodic Theory: with a View towards Number Theory
- Peter Walters, An Introduction to Ergodic Theory
- Steven Kalikow & Randall Mccutcheon, An Outline of Ergodic Theory
- Karl Petersen, Ergodic Theory.
- A complete proof of Szemeredi's Theorem.
- Gowers's alternative proof of Szemeredi's Theorem.
- Geodesic flow on quotients of the hyperbolic plane.
- Dynamical systems on locally compact groups.
- Ergodic Ramsey Theory.
Prerequisites: Real analysis at the level of Math 112 is strongly recommended. Knowledge of measure theory as in Math 114 will help, but is not required.
Knots and Primes, by Chao Li, ([email protected]) and Charmaine Sia ([email protected])
Website
A knot is an embedding of a circle in 3-space. A prime number is a
natural number with no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. They
are the basic objects of study in knot theory and number theory
respectively and have attracted the interest of many mathematicians over
the course of history. In knot theory, mathematicians developed various
knot invariants to determine when two knots are not equivalent; in
number theory, mathematicians use the behavior of various primes to
study arithmetic problems.
Surprisingly, these two seemingly unrelated concepts have a deep analogy
discovered by Barry Mazur in the 1960s while studying the Alexander
polynomial. This initiated the study of what is now known as arithmetic
topology. Pursuing deeper connections between knot theory and number
theory may raise new points of view and lead to interesting problems and
progress in these fields. In this tutorial, we will explore some
aspects of this beautiful analogy between knots and primes.
Tentative syllabus:
We will introduce basic knot theory and number theory, providing many
examples and focusing on the intuition and motivation behind the
concepts introduced, with the aim of discussing analogies between
linking numbers and quadratic reciprocity,
fundamental groups and Galois groups,
3-manifolds and number rings,
knots and primes, the Alexander polynomial and Iwasawa theory.
Reading material and Reference texts:
- Knots and Primes: An Introduction to Arithmetic Topology by Masanori Morishita, Universitext, Springer (2012).
- Lecture notes will be provided.
- Analogies between decompositions of knots and primes
- Analogies between homology groups and class groups
- Genus theory of knots and primes
- Arithmetic duality theorems
- Milnor invariants and multiple residue symbols
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of point set topology on the level of Math 131 and rings and fields on the level of Math 123.
Archive: Old Summer Tutorials, since 2001
| Summer Tutorials: | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 |
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