Back to School Seminar
grad students share math they've been up to this summer
Organizer: Bryan Lu (blu17@uw.edu)
Meetings: Fridays 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM @ PDL C-038
Over the summer, the graduate students at UW have learned many new and interesting topics from conferences, summer schools, reading courses, or just on their own. This seminar is intended to be a place where we can share what we have recently learned to our fellow graduate students. Not only does this serve as a way to reengage with our existing graduate student community after the summer, but it also welcomes the incoming cohort of students and introduces topics that we are interested in.
This seminar is aimed at all of our graduate students, so talks should be accessible to a general audience. Ideally, at least \(\frac 1e\) of your talk should be accessible to incoming first-year students. Talks should be approximately 51 minutes long, with time for questions afterwards.
Schedule
Week 2 – October 3, 2025
Speaker: Nelson Niu
Title: A categorical framework for coherence theorems
Abstract: Categories with operations that are associative, commutative, and distributive up to isomorphism abound in mathematics: for instance, in homotopy theory, they are the inputs to infinite loop space machines and K-theory functors. But before we can work with such categories, we must prove coherence theorems for them to ensure these structures are well-behaved. In ongoing joint work with Jonathan Rubin, we establish a general categorical approach to proving such coherence theorems versatile enough to incorporate (weak) distributivity laws, module and algebra categories, and the higher arity twisted products that appear in equivariant settings. Building on Mac Lane’s original coherence proof for symmetric monoidal categories, we employ tools from logic and rewriting theory to study the relevant universal parameter categories, clarifying the necessary axioms.
Week 3 – October 10, 2025
Speaker: Grace O’Brien
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Week 4 – October 17, 2025
Speaker: Clare Minnerath
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Week 5 – October 24, 2025
Speaker: Ethan MacBrough
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Week 6 – October 31, 2025
Speaker: Connor McCausland
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Week 7 – November 7, 2025
Speaker: Dan Guyer
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Week 8 – November 14, 2025
Speaker: Varun Shah
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Week 9 – November 21, 2025
Speaker: Ting Gong
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Week 11 – December 5, 2025
Speaker: Bryan Lu
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD