Condensed Matter Seminar: "Imposing Curved Shapes on Solid Sheets: Instabilities, Isometries and Asymptotic Isometries"
Benny Davidovitch (UMass, Amherst)
Imposing a curved shape on a solid sheet, generates in it elastic stress. This familiar motif is a consequence of Gauss’ theorema
Egregium, which posits that there exists no isometric map…
Astro Seminar: "What Sets the Maximum Rotation Rate of Neutron Stars? "
Ira Wasserman (Cornell)
The fastest rotating neutron star spins at a frequency of 716 Hz, or a period of about 1.4 milliseconds. This rapidly rotating neutron star was discovered about 30 years after the previous record holder, at 642 Hz. …
NSF GRFP Fellowship Application Workshops for Graduate Students
Kristen Coakley, Assistant Director Science Outreach Initiative (UPenn)
If you would like to sign up to attend a workshop, please email Kristen Coakley (kcoakley@sas.upenn.edu) with your preferred date. All workshops cover the…
Math-Bio seminar: "Geography and Adaptation
Peter Ralph (University of Southern California)
Most species are distributed across geography, and so can develop regional differences in different parts of the range. These may often be as a result of natural selection, and the geographic scale on which different…
High Energy Theory Seminar: "TBA"
Alberto Nicolis (Columbia University)
Astro Seminar: "The Local Universe as a Cosmological Lens "
Jonathan Hargis (Haverford)
The local universe serves as a lens through which we can understand the formation of galaxies in a dark energy + cold dark matter(LCDM) context. Numerical simulations suggest that galaxies grow hierarchically; that…
Math-Bio Seminar: "momi: A new method for inferring demography and computing the multipopulation sample frequency spectrum"
John A. Kamm, UC Berkeley
The sample frequency spectrum (SFS) describes the distribution of allele counts at segregating sites, and is a useful statistic for both summarizing genetic data and inferring biological parameters. SFS-based…
Physics Department Colloquium: "Fluid 'Ratchets' and Biological Locomotion"
Jun Zhang (NYU-Courant Institute)
In this talk, I will discuss a few laboratory experiments that were inspired from examples of biological locomotion. There, solid structures were forced to interact with their surrounding fluid. These structures, or…
High Energy Theory Seminar: “Thriving From the Vacuum”
Claudia de Rham (Case University)
Theories of modified gravity in the infrared usually come hand in hand with additional degrees of freedom which couple to matter at gravitational strength and carry a low strong-coupling scale. By including non-…