1. Dates
From March 1st to March 5th, 2010.
2. Description of the week
This week will focus on the use of tools coming from topology for
the study of discrete structures like graphs, clouds of points,... For
example, homology is a well-known concept from topology, which can be
applied to combinatorial problems: the idea is to associate with a
combinatorial object some simplicial complex, so that, by computing its
homology, one gets informations on combinatorial properties of the
original object.
The main lectures of this week will focus on
- Topological methods for combinatorics
- Topological methods for discrete geometry
- Persistence and homology computation
There will be an introductory course about homology on Monday.
Note that this week, the last one of the thematic month, is followed by a (one-week) conference on computational geometry geometry organized by Éric Colin de Verdière and Boris Thibert, from 08-03 to 12-03. Participants of both weeks can thus also interact.
3. Confirmed morning lectures (4h30 each)
- Ron Aharoni: Connectivity, colorability and matchability.
Abstract:
Hypergraphs (namely sets of sets, the latter being called "edges") can
be realized geometrically: every vertex is represented by a point in Rn
and every edge is represented by a "simplex", which is plainly the
convex hull of the points corresponding to its vertices. (There is a
simple requirement – no intersections between simplices should exist
that do not follow from the intersection of the edges themselves. But
this is easy to obtain if n is high enough.) The realization is called
a "simplicial complex" It is usually demanded that the complex is
closed downwards, so we shall always assume that the original
hypergraph has this property. A closed down hypergraph is suitably
called an abstract complexes, or also plainly a complex. Surprisingly,
the properties of the geometric realization can sometimes shed light on
combinatorial properties of the abstract complex. In particular, one
property containing important information is the connectivity of the
complex. This is the dimension of the lowest dimensional "hole" in the
complex, namely an image of Sn that cannot be filled by simplices from
the complex. From the combinatorial point of view, connectivity of
order k means being able to move continuously between edges of size up
to k. Combinatorial usage of the notion of connectivity usually
consists of two parts: 1. showing how properties of the abstract
complex follow from high connectivity of the geometrical complex, and
2. proving lower bounds on the connectivity in terms of combinatorial
parameters. In the talks I will discuss two applications – the
Lovasz lower bound on the chromatic number of a graph in terms of the
connectivity of the neighborhood complex of the graph, and my extension
with P. Haxell of Hall's theorem. Most of the talks will be concerned
with the latter, and its various applications. |
Abstract:
In this series of three lectures, I will introduce the concept of
persistent homology, discuss algorithms, and present applications. A. Homology and Persistent Homology. Homology
groups belong to the oldest topics in Algebraic Topology, dating back
to the founding years. Persistence is a recent addition to the theory,
motivated by practical needs that clash with the instability of
homology computations for noisy data. In contrast, persistence is
stable in a sense we will make precise in this first lecture. B. Matrix Reduction Algorithms. The
classic algorithm for computing homology works by reduction of the
boundary matrices to Smith normal form. A variant of this algorithm can
be used to get the rich collection of persistence information of a
filtration within about the same amount of time. There are fast
implementations for important special cases, including functions on
2-manifolds. C. Applications. Persistent
homology quantifies scale through a measure of the features in a
discrete or continuous structure. It has been used to prove new
mathematical theorems, to analyze scientific datasets, and to generally
shed light on multiscale phenomena in nature. |
Abstract:The
focus of these lectures is on the use of computational topology to
obtain coarse robust global descriptions of nonlinear dynamics. A rough
breakdown of the topics is as follows: Lecture 1:
We will begin with the definitions of homology groups of spaces and the
homorphisms induced by continuous maps. We will then discuss methods
for computing these quantities. Lecture 2: We will
give a brief introduction to dynamical systems and bifurcation theory.
The focus is on why algebraic topological methods are crucial for
applications. We will then discuss isolating neighborhoods,
attractor-repeller pairs, and Morse decompositions in the context of
the decomposition of dynamics and discuss the computation of these
objects. Lecture 3: We will define and discuss the
Conley index as a algebraic tool to understand the structure of
invariant sets. We will conclude with applications to a variety of
different types of problems. |
4. Schedule for the morning lectures
| Lundi | Mardi | Mercredi | Jeudi | Vendredi |
9h-10h30 | Aharoni | Edelsbrunner | Mischaikow | Edelsbrunner | - |
11h-12h30 | Mischaikow | Aharoni | Edelsbrunner | Aharoni | Mischaikow |
5. Currently uploaded slides
6. Participants
See the page http://www.lirmm.fr/~monteil/participants-week-5.html