JOINT MATHEMATICS / STATISTICS COLLOQUIUM
Thursday, April 28th, 4:10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Refreshments at 3:30pm in MSB 1147
Speaker: Lek-Heng Lim (University of Chicago)
Title: “Cohomology and Data”
Abstract: We will discuss how various notions of cohomology (simplicial, de Rham, singular, Cech) play a role in the analysis of data --- from ranking movies given a small set of user ratings to reconstructing the 3D-structure of a molecule given electron microscope images. This talk assumes no knowledge of cohomology. We will explain everything from scratch in terms of the Div, Grad, Curl, and various Laplacian operators on a graph; the only minor departure from vector calculus being that these operators can be take values in an arbitrary group.