Women-in-Math Seminar

2012-2013 Co-organizers

• Lucy Liuxuan Zhang (lzhang **at^ math **dot^ utoronto **dot^ ca)
• Dana Bartosova (dana **dot^ bartosova **at^ utoronto **dot^ ca)
• Iva Halacheva (iva.halacheva **at^ utoronto **dot^ ca)

Description

Mission: This seminar series exists for the purpose of encouraging, inspiring, showcasing and celebrating research of women in math, as well as for stimulating mathematical interactions within and around the still minority community. It is also hoped that this seminar will provide a little oasis where the audience are encouraged to try to learn about, judge and celebrate women's work in mathematics without the influence of gender considerations.

Conception: The idea was original suggested by our own graduate student Karene Chu probably as early as in 2009 at one of the Math Women social gatherings. Lucy Liuxuan Zhang finally embraced the idea in spring 2011, and a consultation/brainstorming session involving 4-5 female grad students of the department took place in April 2011. The consensus was that women (at least the female grad students) in math would definitely benefit from some women-friendly mathematical activities besides the existing social events, and we should get this thing going! The first WiM seminar was made happen in May 2011.

Speakers: If you are a woman working in mathematics in Toronto or somewhere in Southern Ontario, or a visitor to the U of T math department or the Fields Institute, and you have a piece of mathematics you would like to share with us, be it original research or a nice piece of math you learned, we are happy to listen. Don't be shy, student presentations are strongly encouraged! Simply send an email to one of the organizers (Note the format of the seminar below), specifying which month you would like to speak in and we will get back to you soon. Please volunteer to give a talk! Also, if you are a man working on a piece of mathematics inspired or pioneered by some female mathematician, you are also welcome to speak at the seminar. :-)

Format and Time: The seminar takes place once a month, usually towards the end of each month. The talk can be 30 to 50 minutes in length (depending on the speaker's preference), and the level of formality may vary from talk to talk. However, these talks should be designed for a diverse mathematical audience, that is, little specialized background should be assumed. Special time accommodation may be made for the speaker as long as logistics allow.

Audience: Everyone! Regardless of your gender, you are very welcome to join us and get to know us as long as you are willing to strive for equality (complete mastery is not required).

Past WiM Seminars and organizers

• WiM 2011-2012 by Lucy Liuxuan Zhang, with support from Prof. Yale Karshon.

Other supportive communities for women

Hey, check out Women in Mathematics @ MIT! In case you are also kind of interested in physics, consider attending the Women in Physics Canada conference, held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in 2011 and at UBC in 2012. More locally, there is the newly launched Laurier Centre for Women in Science which hosts and organizes interesting events from time to time.

Schedule

Note: Room HU1018 is located on the 10th floor at 215 Huron Street.

Abstracts

September (27) 2012 -- Natasha Dobrinen, Faculty @ U of Denver -- The structure of the Tukey types of ultrafilters: In joint work with Todorcevic, we study the structure of the Tukey types of ultrafilters. Tukey reduction is a means by which one may classify the strength of general partial orderings. The study of Tukey reducibility was first introduced in the study of Moore-Smith convergence in topology. Since then, it has been successfully used as a means to classify partial orderings in certain settings. A current area of research is the classification of ultrafilters up to Tukey reducibility. We give an introduction to this area of research and present an overview of the current findings.

October (25) 2012 -- Anne Dranovski, Undergraduate and NSERC USRA 2012 awardee @ U of T -- The quest for irreducible representations of S_n: We discuss how and why Young tableaux are used in the study of representations of the symmetric group.

October (25) 2012 -- Viktoriya Baydina, Undergraduate @ U of T -- Group structure of elliptic curve: A brief introduction to elliptic curves based on material taught at the two week WIM Summer School at Waterloo. What are elliptic curves and how can we define a group structure on them? We will discuss the group law, Lutz-Nagell theorem and Mordel's theorem.

November (20) 2012 -- Lucy Liuxuan Zhang, PhD student @ U of T -- Fibre bundle framework for quantum fault tolerance: Since it's a mathematical audience, I will start by giving a mathematical characterization of quantum error correction and fault tolerance, just what we need to understand this talk. We introduce a differential geometric framework for describing families of quantum error-correcting codes and for understanding quantum fault tolerance. In particular, we use fibre bundles and a natural projectively flat connection thereon to study the transformation of codewords under unitary fault-tolerant evolutions. We'll explain how the fault-tolerant logical operations are given by the monodromy group for the bundles with projectively flat connection, which is always discrete. Time permitting, we will discuss the construction of the said bundles for two examples of fault-tolerant families of operations, the string operators in the toric code and the qudit transversal gates.

January (30) 2013 -- Dana Bartosova, PhD student @ U of T -- Ramsey property for Boolean algebras with ideals and dynamics of the Cantor set: I will give an introduction to the theory connecting Frïssé theory, Ramsey theory and topological dynamics of Kechris, Pestov and Todorcevic. I will prove the Ramsey property for classes of finite Boolean algebras with distinguished ideals and apply the results to the dynamics of the Cantor set.