Michael Zhao Memorial Student Colloquium
The Michael Zhao Memorial Student Colloquium holds 45-minute talks by Columbia mathematics faculty about their own research. The talks are intended for current PhD students in mathematics at Columbia. If you are an undergraduate student or external graduate student and would like to come, please email Ethan Hall or Shijie Dai .

When: Thursday 6:00 - 7:00 PM ET
Where: Mathematics Building, Room 528
Organizers: Ethan Hall, Shijie Dai
Date Speaker Title and Abstract
February 12 Matthew Hase-Liu
Abstract: One fruitful approach to studying the geometry of a variety X is through understanding the space Mor(C,X) of curves C on X. When X is a smooth hypersurface of low degree, I'll explain how the circle method from analytic number theory can be used to shed light on the dimension, number of components, size and quality of singularities, class in the Grothendieck ring of varieties, and cohomology of Mor(C,X).
March 12 Ovidiu Savin
Abstract: I will discuss the classical obstacle problem and related problems, and provide an overview on the free boundary regularity theory for such problems.
April 9 Myungsin Cho
Abstract: One of the central interests in algebraic topology is to study spaces that behave like abelian groups. The language developed to systematically study such homotopy-theoretic analogues of abelian groups is the category of spectra. In this talk, I will explain how this perspective provides a conceptual viewpoint on classical results such as Poincaré duality and the Universal Coefficient Theorem. I will also discuss how similar duality phenomena appear in algebraic K-theory.
April 16 Mu-Tao Wang
Abstract: