NYMC Talk by Dr. Abhinav Kumar on Sphere Packing скачать в хорошем качестве

NYMC Talk by Dr. Abhinav Kumar on Sphere Packing

NYMC celebrates the end of Fall Semester 2017 with a special presentation by Dr. Abhinav Kumar on sphere packing. How can we arrange equal sized non-overlapping balls in space to maximize the fraction of space covered? This easy to state problem and its generalization to n dimensions captured the attention of mathematicians, physicists and greengrocers alike for centuries. This talk explores the history of the problem and its very interesting and idiosyncratic (putative) solutions, in particular some recent breakthroughs in 8- and 24-dimensional sphere packing. Dr. Abhinav Kumar is a mathematician working at Renaissance Technologies, a well-known hedge fund. He achieved a silver and a gold medal for the Indian team at the IMO, and was also ranked first out of ~125,000 on the IIT entrance exam. He attended MIT, where he was a triple major, two-time William Lowell Putnam Fellow, and winner of undergraduate academic awards in both math and physics. After completing his PhD with Noam Elkies and Barry Mazur at Harvard, he returned to MIT as a faculty member. In particular, he was an instructor for MIT's Putnam seminar for mathematical problem solving. Since 2014 he has been in the finance industry. He has a courtesy appointment at Stony Brook University, which allows him to spend some of his (nonexistent) free time doing theoretical math. He was happy to be part of the team which solved the sphere packing problem in 24 dimensions in 2016, a few weeks after Maryna Viazovska's breakthrough solution in dimension 8.