Free Play!



Join the students of FR 410 for a performance of "Paris, Ma Muse", an original play written during the course of Fall semester, on Tuesday, Dec. 10 at 6:30 pm in the Commonwealth House (Gaines Center for the Humanities on Maxwell St).



A reception will follow the performance.

Title: Informatics and Modeling Platform for Stable Isotope-Resolve Metabolomics



Abstract: Recent advances in stable isotope-resolved metabolomics (SIRM) are enabling orders-of-magnitude increase in the number of observable metabolic traits (a metabolic phenotype) for a given organism or community of organisms.  Analytical experiments that take only a few minutes to perform can detect stable isotope-labeled variants of thousands of metabolites.  Thus, unique metabolic phenotypes may be observable for almost all significant biological states, biological processes, and perturbations.  Currently, the major bottleneck is the lack of data analysis that can properly organize and interpret this mountain of phenotypic data as highly insightful biochemical and biological information for a wide range of biological research applications.  To address this limitation, we are developing bioinformatic, biostatistical, and systems biochemical tools, implemented in an integrated data analysis platform, that will directly model metabolic networks as complex inverse problems that are optimized and verified by experimental metabolomics data.  This integrated data analysis platform will enable a broad application of SIRM from the discovery of specific metabolic phenotypes representing biological states of interest to a mechanism-based understanding of a wide range of biological processes with particular metabolic phenotypes.

Over the years, Dr. Tamanoi has researched, from an anthropological perspective, broad historical issues of Japanese Empire/"Manchuria" as a transnational space of contacts, conflicts, and negotiations.  This lecture will build on her research and will become a truly exciting occasion that is relevant and attractive to a wide range of audience.  

From the Scholar:

"I began the research on the Japanese agrarian immigration to Northeast China in the mid-1980s, and published Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (University of Hawai'i Press) in 2009. Like any scholar, I began this research with the big questions—how ordinary Japanese embodied the state power in Japan’s puppet-state of Manchuria and how they remembered their power in postwar Japan. However, during this long process of research and writing (that lasted for over two decades), I met (and still meet) so many people, who changed not only THE questions but also how I conducted my research in many small and big ways. In my presentation, I would like to “look back” this long process of my own research and share some lessons I learned from my own memories with the audience."

Title:  Some progresses on two-dimensional Riemann problems in gas dynamics

Abstract:  Two dimensional Riemann problems for compressible fluid flows assume the simplest piecewise sectorial initial state but provide the most fundamental wave configurations, including the reflection of oblique shocks and vortex-shock interaction etc. In this talk I will show many fascinating pictures, based on 2D Riemann solutions, to disclose the mysteries of compressible fluid world both through analytical tools (in the form of mathematical theorems) and computational techniques (in the form of simulations). The analysis is based on the characteristic decomposition theory we developed recently, while the simulations are obtained using the generalized Riemann problem (GRP) scheme that is equipped with a highly accurate solver in the construction of numerical fluxes by a way of tracking singularities analytically and keeping entropy exactly computed. 

Title:  Smoothness of isometries between subRiemannian manifolds

Abstract:  In a joint work with Enrico Le Donne (Jyvaskyla, Finland), we show that the group of isometries (i.e., distance-preserving homeomorphisms) of an equiregular subRiemannian manifold is a finite-dimensional Lie group of smooth transformations. The proof is based on a new PDE argument, in the spirit of harmonic coordinates, establishing that in an arbitrary subRiemannian manifold there exists an open dense subset where all isometries are smooth.