2022 - Enhanced Research Experience for Undergraduates
Topic: Geometry and Dynamics of Surfaces
Led by: Yusheng Luo and Matthew Romney

Sponsored by the Summer Math Foundation,
the Stony Brook Department of Mathematics,
and Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URECA)

PhD thesis defense

Symplectic Criteria on Stratified Uniruledness of Affine Varieties
and Applications to the Miminal Model Program

by Dahye Cho

December 6th, Monday, 1 pm-2:25 pm at P-131.

Part I - August 19th 1pm - 5pm
Part II - August 20th 1pm - 5pm
Math Tower P-131
Matthew Lam
August 4, 2021

We present a twistor correspondence for half-flat almost-Grassmannian structures on real manifolds. An almost-Grassmannian structure is (essentially) a factorization of the tangent bundle, which determines two preferred families of tangent subspaces, and this structure is said to be half-flat if one of these families is integrable. We provide global results when the underlying manifold is a Grassmannian of 2-planes, and show there exist nontrivial deformations of the standard almost-Grassmannian structure. Whereas twistor constructions typically involve moduli of closed curves in a complex manifold, we utilize and expand upon the more flexible approach pioneered by LeBrun and Mason using moduli of curves-with-boundary.

July 19-23
Frederik Benirschke
June 4, 2021

We describe the boundary of linear subvarieties in the moduli space of multi-scale differentials. Linear subvarieties are algebraic subvarieties of strata of (possibly) meromorphic differentials that in local period coordinates are given by linear equations. The main examples of such are affine invariant submanifolds, that is, closures of SL(2,R)-orbits. We prove that the boundary of any linear subvariety is again given by linear equations in generalized period coordinates of the boundary. Our main technical tool is an asymptotic analysis of periods near the boundary of the moduli space of multi-scale differentials which yields further techniques and results of independent interest.

Lisandra Hernandez-Vazquez
May 20th, 2021

We propose a new approach to the question of prescribing Gaussian curvature on the 2-sphere with at least three conical singularities and angles less than $2\pi$, the main result being sufficient conditions for a positive function of class at least $C^2$ to be the Gaussian curvature of such a conformal conical metric on the round sphere. Our methods particularly differ from the variational approach in that they don’t rely on the Moser-Trudinger inequality. Along the way, we also prove a general precompactness theorem for compact Riemann surfaces with at least three conical singularities and angles less than $2\pi$.

Hang Yuan
May 18, 2021

Given a Lagrangian fibration, we provide a natural construction of a mirror Landau-Ginzburg model consisting of a rigid analytic space, a superpotential function, and a dual fibration based on Fukaya’s family Floer theory. The mirror in the B-side is constructed by the counts of holomorphic disks in the A-side together with the non-archimedean analysis and the homological algebra of the A infinity structures. It fits well with the SYZ dual fibration picture and explains the quantum/instanton corrections and the wall crossing phenomenon. Instead of a special Lagrangian fibration, we only need to assume a weaker semipositive Lagrangian fibration to carry out the non-archimedean SYZ mirror reconstruction

Jack Burkart
May 12, 2021

Let $f: \mathbb{C} \rightarrow \mathbb{C}$ be a non-polynomial entire function, which we call a transcendental entire function. The Julia set of $f$ is defined to be the set of all points such that the iterates of $f$ do not form a normal family. In other words, a point is in the Julia set if and only if there exists points arbitrarily close by that have a different orbit under iteration by $f$.

Computer images of Julia sets show that they have a rich fractal structure. Through the work of Baker, McMullen, Stallard, Bishop, and many others, the Hausdorff dimension of Julia sets of transcendental entire functions must be between 1 and 2, and all values between 1 and 2 are attained. However, much less is known for other notions of dimension, such as the packing dimension. Bishop constructed an example where the Julia set has packing dimension and Hausdorff dimension equal to 1, and otherwise all other examples where the packing dimension has been computed, it has been equal to 2.

We will show how to construct transcendental entire functions whose Julia sets have packing dimension strictly between 1 and 2. In fact, we will show that the set of all values attained is dense in the interval (1,2), and we will show that the Hausdorff and packing dimension may be arranged to be arbitrarily close together.