Seminar Plus Plus

This semester saw me attending more seminar than usual. Also the topic of seminar are more variety. Instead of having just mathematical physics stuffs, I am currently listen to the physics seminar. To add more, it is very unusual for me to listen to the experimental stuffs. When I used the word listen. What I mean is mostly during the seminar I listen more than understand them. Perhaps, I've been too attach to the physics maths makes me that way. But this is another good practice for me to be more one can say versatile. hehehe... Up to now, I have attended the particle physics, cosmology, string theory and the latest one which is today is molecular chemistry physics i.e. the study of optical spectroscopy of photosynthetic protein complexes. Yes, as I said this is very unusual.

Also, today seminar was given by a graduate student who already specialized in this spectroscopy analysis of protein complexes. This seminar is one of the compulsory seminar for graduate student before they are graduated. From what I heard she was the first graduate to present in this particular semester. The community of physics here in Concordia is not too big if compare to maths and stats community.

After the seminar the chair announced that, to all graduate student please don't be afraid to give a seminar because as you can see it is not as difficult and scary as you thought. Let us thank the speaker today. I am not aware of how seminar was organized here in the Physics Department since I'm used to the maths physics seminar. For which as a theorist we give an informal presentation almost all the time. Also in our graduate course, the final project usually needs us to present before you hand in the report. I know this because I have presenting on selected topic twice.

In our work, if we stop to presenting and discussing, all the 'things' that we learned and understand will be forgotten. It is kind of practice. When I first came to Montreal, I spoke to my adviser how well these people talked about something which is scientifically, so smoothly and confident. He replied that, you will learned all the related stuffs and in the end you will get used to them and finally one will be able to do just it. That is why, I've been presenting my progress or any task given in terms of discussion once a week. And my adviser do encouraged me if I have an advanced progress I can always knock out his door and start presenting.

This style however sometimes makes me feel 'sick' because of the need of the level of continuation. Of cause as a normal human kind, we always need our own sweet time or some even called it the lazy time. Though to think it again, this is you yourself who created this your 'own' time. It is very subjective. So, I guess I will trying my best to develop the fun thing out of it. In that way one can not see it as a burden but as one interest.

But up till now, sometimes I still get nervous when I do my presentation (formal) especially when you know who is your crowd is. Perhaps with a good preparation, it will went well.

p\s-I still remember how my former adviser told his student that be responsible when you are giving a talk (informal or formal). Remember that the audience spare some of their valuable time to hear you talk. And you have to respect them and present in a way that is well-presenting.

Maths Physics Seminar

The title of today's talk is "Illusion of space-time and quantum mechanics (QM)" given by Professor Pavel K. Smrz from University of Newcastle, Australia. For more see this link.

As usual, I went to University de Montreal (UdEM) using metro subways since I can't stand to walk up the hill to the seminar room. And before the seminar started, I just noticed there is a conference given in CRM (Center of Mathematical Research), UdEM which is in 2007 that have a participant from Malaysia. The topic was heavy called

Groups and Symmetries: From Neolitics Scots to John Mackay"

This participant from Malaysia is known to be my former supervisor's colleague who her Phd advisor was Professor Leon Takhtajan from SUNY Stony Brook, New York. Prof. Takhtajan is one of the speaker in EQuaLS1.

I was so impressed that Malaysia do have a representative in this kind of I might say difficult area. John Mackay on the other hand is a very famous mathematician with his works on computation group theory and also Galois theory related from Concordia whom I met before during my Lie group class last winter 2008 (see this post). To be honest I was really inspired by these people.

Weekly Mathematical Physics Seminar

This is the first maths physics seminar of the semester which took place at UdeM (Université de Montréal, French local university). The topic of the day is "États cohérents et comprimés pour des systèmes quantiques et potentiel de Morse". Yes, it was given in French which means "The Coherent states in one-dimensional of quantum system in a presence of Morse Potential".

Fortunately that the slides was in English. At least I know what the speaker was explaining when she refer to the slides. But of course I missed most of the elaboration or maybe certain examples which is not in the slides when she talking while not refering to the slides.

My advisor also coming to the seminar (he encouraged me to go even if it is in French) since the topic is closely related to his research interest and perhaps my future area. He even asked question and yes he asked in French. I asked the next day what is his question. So he told me.

The topic is somehow on the introductory to the what is called the coherent states. And instead of trying to solve in terms of the famously quantum harmonic oscillator, the speaker used the presence of Morse Potential. One knows that Morse potential give a much more reliable model when it comes to compute the potential energy of a diatomic molecules. It gives a better approximation for the vibrational structure of a molecule than that of the quantum harmonic oscillator. So the topic this week is showing some results (recent) due to this advantages.

Department Seminar

Today I've been told by my advisor that there will be a seminar given by a new member of Mathematics and Statistics Department. So every new recruited member of the department will have to give a seminar to the rest of the department related to his/her specialization. Today the speaker who is an algebraic geometrist give a talk on "Singularity of polynomial of characteristic zero and characteristic p".

Obviously this topic is not my interest but since I have my advisor attending it and also I found there is also few other students who attend. Then might be I guess I can learn something new about.

The speaker defined on what he called the log canonical threshold which works on the characteristic zero and the f-pure threshold (f for Frobenius) that works on the characteristic p>0. But first he presented on what he call a singularity in terms of functions that takes only an integer element. And of course one of the example is a cusp (pronouce cus with silent p). He talked more about an hour before he meets with the department committee due to his new position in Concordia.

After he give his talked, there are questions and answers session. Most of the question were given by the mathematical physicists. Since I've known each of them. The rest were by mathematicians. This session in general give an introductory of a personal interest of a new member to the department. So that the rest of the member will know what is his skills and on what basis do he specialized in. So to be more even general, it is like a breaking the ice session.

ISM Colloquium 2009-Day 1

I've signed up to be as the attendees of the ISM Gaduate Sudent Conference 2009 which is held annually. This year the conference is held at UQAM (Universite du Quebec a Montreal) (a friend told that last two years it was at Concordia). At the early beginning, the organizer did mentioned that talks could be given in French (as the official language of Quebec) or English or both. As in my previous experience, lots of student prefer to speak in French rather than English especially if they came from the non-English university (in Montreal there are only two English (-speaking) university, McGill and Concordia).

I have no problem to listen to any seminar who was in French but the slides are in English. So as they present we can read on through the slides. And also, some term in French is similar to one we have in English. Where the differences are on the pronounciations and spells.

Today after the registration, I scanned the list of the abstracts given. 90% of the talks will be in French. As it happened previously, I am a bit of awkward to really asked the speaker to give their talks in English just for a minor group like myself because the looks from the rest appeared inconvenient. So lets look at the summary below

#1. Sarah Dufour on educational mathematics. How student can learn differential calculus (purely in French)

#2. Sebastian Labbe. software, SAGE where the communication language are the phyton (the slides blend between English and French). I found this talk interesting as it's more on software applications and examples.

#3. Jerome Fortier, Contemplating Incompletness. (slides in English). A story of the process of constructing a mathematical theory. Content- tons of theorems.

Plenary Speaker (Damien Calaque from Universite Claude Bernard, Lyon France) talked on the theory of Lie in the complex géometrie, by way of the isomorphism of Duflo. This talk should be in French, but after made a personal request from the speaker, he said that he has no problem to give a talk in English since his slides are already in French (so that everyone is happy). But need a proven by the organizer. I am fortunate that it is done in English. This topic is related on how Lie algebra exist in the relation of Duflo's result of isomorphism. Which is by the analogue of Duflo isomorphism of complex geometry. The speaker is a mathematical physicist.

Department Seminar

After a long pause of no seminar, today we have a seminar given by a visiting professor of Professor Bob Raphael who research interest are on ring theory and commutative algebra. The speaker Dr. John Kennison is from Clark University, (Worcester, Mass). He speaks on the "Elementary Aspects of Multivalued Logic, Dynamical systems, Chaos, Topos and Banach Algebras".

I'm not sure if the topics suits me that well. But as my SV reminded me that its good to attend as many seminar as I can. It is not a compulsory but at least, just to show some interest and getting to know what are the progress of other current research.

Dr. Kennison talked on how the multivalued logic contributes to dynamical systems and chaos (or best for probability statistic). For example, at present how the prediction of the weather forecast is being measured. It is well known that the accuracy of prediction of weather is correct only up to one day prediction only. He gives an example of having a state of weather denoted by x=x_{i} (read x subscript i) and the time series of each state denoted by t(x)={t(x_{i})}. And the rest, certain properties that these parameter satisfied such that they can be used later during the calculations.

I would rather list out something that is interesting to know...

After the seminar, there is one professor asking about how fuzzy logic can also contribute to probability. Dr. Kennison then replied that fuzzy logic doesn't handle probability very well. And this is supported by another professor who works very closely on fuzzy logic. He elaborated, but I lost sights of his comments. hehehe... And next Dr. Kennison made a statement that topos is superior of fuzzy logic. I'm not sure why is that.

Another commend made by another professor saying that open sets are a good lattice structure (again I don't know why). That's why all of these worked very well. But I do know that open sets are one of the properties in the study of topology.

Department Research Seminar

his is the continuing of department pizza seminar with a new name called department research seminar. It's a less catchy than the previous name. But the way the seminar was organized will be the same. Towards the end of the seminar, pizza will be served.

In this seminar the talk was given by my Lie Group teacher. The title was Introduction to Tau-Function. The outline were examples of Tau-Function and also the application one can have of the function due to physics interest. So, I must say most of the crowd is a very familiar faces with a mathematical physics background. The speaker used a slide presentation with a total of 37 slides and a given one hour timing. But there were not enough time and the rest 10 slides were sacrificed.

However, the contents are quite interesting to me. The famous example of the Tau-Function would be the Schur function, solitons, tau-function that is associated to algebraic curve and random processes. The common application that physicist can benefits from the Tau-Function would be on the fermionic Fock space. This is something that a particle physicist would deal with. Which I may never tried to go into deep.

The beauty of the examples of the Tau-Function is that they have a determinant properties and there's two more which I forget to write it down during the seminar. hehehe.

Ph.D Thesis Proposal

I went to the scariest talk ever this afternoon. The talk was meant for the Ph.D thesis proposal (see below title). This is the first time I've had a chance to joint this kind of a talk. To make this talk even scarier is the audience is a number theorist which make the talk is dense with an unfamiliar notations and terminologies. I think I picked the wrong slots. The topic is not really for me. Well, it is not like I ever want to try to understand the contents but the main idea of joining would be to have some kind of a motivation. I would love to see and feel how's it like to present your thesis proposal because eventually I will do same as this is part of the comprehensive exam. But on the other hand, I do found some familiar concepts like the group homomorphism and irreducible representation being mention in his early talk.

From my observation,

1. There are five audience, which includes the advisor, two co-advisors and two audience (count me in).
2. The advisor and the co are empty handed. No papers at hand and don't even note down a single thing while the speaker is presenting.
3. The speaker used a blackboard for his presentation and not once he ever refer to any reference while he's presenting.
4. The speaker is well known of those of the notations he used, and matters that he was saying.
5. When the speaker get lost or cannot answer some question, his advisor took in charged.
6. When the speaker was not known to an answer, he can definitely say I have no idea...

The thing that I learned would be

1. Be precise (always) what you are explaining. Give examples, perhaps a definition and so on up to every notations that you used. Don't aspect audience is well-aware to what you are presenting even though they really an expert.
2. A general organized talk would be to have a motivations of research, reviews from previous works, thesis problem and expected output.

Note: Apart from the above two things, I need to work on more in the first part. My former supervisor used to remind me of this...

Title of the talk:
Constructing Special Types of Fontaine Sheaves: Comparison Isomorphism Theorems

Graduate Student Seminar

Yesterday was the starting of the graduate student seminar for the year of 2009 of the Winter term. Yesterday also, my schedule was pretty tight as I have a replacement of weekly discussion at 2 p.m., then at 3 p.m. my French Cancan session will took place for one hour and half. Later at 5 p.m. I need to rush myself to McGill University for the graduate student seminar for another 90 minutes.

At the beginning I was not plan to go to this seminar which is given by an algebraic (geometric) topologist entitled Introduction to Khovanov homology. Even though the abstract (see below) did mention about the contents will be quite rudimentary. I just knew that, somehow, it was not going to very quite elementary at all. Yes when you are talking about algebraic topology, most of the students here also well-know to the difficulty of the subjects.

However, after finishing my French Cancan session, I decided to go. I don't know where the sudden guts took over me, but I just did. And this time, I'm not going to walk all the way to McGill because I know that I cannot stand the cold and the windchill. So I took the metro instead (so far I have a very close attached to this transport). Still after I went out from the metro (with so many exit doors), I found out I was lost. It's not that the same exit as I was expected to be which is very close and I can see the main entrance of McGill right away. It took me about 10 minutes to figure the way out and I reached the seminar room 15 minutes late and the seminar was already started.

I sit at the very front row (this will prevent oneself to be fall asleep), and telling myself, I'm going to be board and most probably confuse trying to listening to the talk. However... yes however, the speaker was really remarkable. He used an upper case handwriting for the whole time and started to talk mostly algebra and how TQFT (topological quantum field theory) is related to the functors of monoidal map. Mostly he showed the algebra that he used (combinatory) to try to solve some of knot's problem. And he call the algebra and the idea was pretty "cute". How cool is that. I think I never heard anyone telling somethings that is maths were cute. He present it in a leisurely but yet professional and the connection of each topics were smoothly arranged. I admit that I don't recall some or most of the terminologies especially related to knot and combinatory theory, but overall I think it worth to be happened to join this seminar.

Abstract:

About 10 years ago, Khovanov introduced an interesting homological knot invariant. This is a completely combinatorial gadget, that makes use of some interesting algebra. I'll outline the definition, and try to give some highlights of the developments since the relatively recent discovery of the theory. The talk will aim to be quite elementary.
(special thanks go to CRM-ISM website)

My First Presentation

Wow...I just finished my first presentation today. And that will be the end of the touchè of the last course of my fall term. There are five of us and the speaker was selected in an alphabetical order. The rest were using their family name instead of their own name but I choose to use mine. And so I was the third person to give the talk.

My topic was quite a straight forward. It is the representation theorem and distributional function. I have to cover two topics which consists of six unequal theorem. The whole idea of the topic was to used the general theorem of converges in order to proof the representation theorem. This is actually a theoretical rather than practical subject. There's nothing more to add up to the theorem. I think I am lucky to have choose this topic. Because in my opinion anyone can do the same if they are given the opportunity. Nothing much to argue.

As usual, like I'm used to give a simple talk during my day at Physics Dept. (for the quantum group discussion..) my aim for the presentation was to make sure that the audience is with me and I'm not carried away with my own thoughts and so on.

Language Does Matter

I went to another series of ISM Graduate Seminar yesterday at UDEM (University of Montreal). I have missed twice seminar for this venue as it was a French University. This time, the speaker was my friend, Valerie. Her talked was on how to compute the coherent state for a Poincare (2+1) group which is related to my future research (I believe). I asked Valerie earlier wherether she would prepare her presentation in English or French. She said that she not sure yet, not that if I insist. She kind of preparing a bilingua for the presentation.

At the first place I just want to cancel my present to the seminar. Because I don't want to put her in an awkward way. To just speak in English just because of me alone. But again, there's nothing wrong to have the English version as English is our FIRST language ever. So I decided to go and just see what happened. I sit at the very front of the seminar room. The speaker made an earlier announcement in French that she will present in English since there's one student here who don't understand French. Funny that I actually understand her, since she point me to the rest of the room and I can here she pronounced Anglais (English). That obvious huh...

The presentation went on slow. And question and answer keep on popping up in French, until the end of the session. I asked one of my friend from Greek who speak well French. She told me that it's difficult for a French student here to actually understand the English especially the scientific terminology and others. It takes time for them. This remind me of the same situation happened to us to understand the terms in English when we're learning in our mother tongue Malay.

The way that I saw it, the rest of the student who learn science in French has the same 'level' as if one learn in English. Not even far by an inch. In fact some even better.

Math Physics Seminar

We had our very first of Math Physics Seminar of this fall term. The seminar was given by a visitor from Palermo University. His talk was on SUSY, intertwining operators and related vector coherent states. It was a nice feeling that the group who also attend this seminar is quite a number of people. Some were from other universities as well (the group of physics and mathematics).

For the first part of the seminar, I can actually follow the speaker and his content. His talked very clear and slow (I think this is why I found that one of the audience fell asleep) . He touched on the operator of the hamiltonian and stuff like that in quantum mechanics. The idea of susy QM came from when you can find other hamiltonian like H_{2}, H_{3} and so on when you already have your H_{1}. This is what he called the partner of hamiltonian operator. He later relate the idea with the coherent states which is closely related to what my supervisor is working on. And at this point I lost count. hehe...

At the end in the QnA session, the professor who actually fell asleep during the seminar was being the first one to ask. Oh oo...

Pizza Seminar

Last Friday Mathematicals and Statistics Department of Concordia has organized a pizza seminar. It was organized weekly where the speaker is among of the lecturers from the department and the topic is a general one. The audiences is among the graduate students and also academic staffs of the department. The talk of the day is Why Should We Care About The Philosophy in Mathematics by Professor Byers (I'm referring his book on mathematical thinking).

Its been a month now that I'm here. The regular tradition that I can observed would be how they love pizza very much...Almost in any activities, there will be a pizza serving at the end of it.
Everyone just enjoy them very much.

Graduate Student Seminar- UQAM

Never walk along with these people. Is it because of they do have longer legs than I am?

It was my first time to join the Graduate Student Seminar organized by ISM (Institut des sciences mathématiques) an institute with the member of 8 Quebec's university. This week it was running at UQAM (Universite de Quebec). There were three of us from Concordia (myself, valerie and alexhandra). I thought we're going to take a metro to UQAM. But they choose to walk since the weather is so nice, not so windy and no rain. And again I thought it was very nearby.

I just can't believed that I just passes three other metro stations just to get to UQAM. Goshh..it took us 20 minutes to reach at the seminar place. I might say that it will be from our faculty of science to the fact of engineering. However, our route was just straight way fo the east from Concordia through all the tall buildings. To tell the truth, I'm not complaining that we walked. The thing is these two girls walk very fast. Well they were really really fast. Two steps of mine will be consecutively to equal to their one step, I think. I felt like I'm running and it was so exhausted. My leg feel so tired and the next morning it hurts. hahaha... you know the feeling of when you're been running for the first time.

Next week the seminar would be at UDM (Université de Montréal) and after that at our place. I wonder if we're gonna walk again. But, alamak next week is hari raya on the oct 1st. Can I make it to the seminar? Let see

notes: I manage to find the Muslim prayer room at concordia. It's nice place but quite further to my lab.