The van der Corput trick, and equidistribution on nilmanifolds

This week I was in Columbus, Ohio, attending a conference on equidistribution on manifolds. I talked about my recent paper with Ben Green on the quantitative behaviour of polynomial sequences in nilmanifolds, which I have blogged about previously. During my talk (and inspired by the immediately preceding talk of Vitaly Bergelson), I stated explicitly for the first time a generalisation of the van der Corput trick which morally underlies our paper, though it is somewhat buried there as we specialised it to our application at hand (and also had to deal with various quantitative issues that made the presentation more complicated). After the talk, several people asked me for a more precise statement of this trick, so I am presenting it here, and as an application reproving an old theorem of Leon Green that gives a necessary and sufficient condition as to whether a linear sequence on a nilmanifold is equidistributed, which generalises the famous theorem of Weyl on equidistribution of polynomials.

UPDATE, Feb 2013: It has been pointed out to me by Pavel Zorin that this argument does not fully recover the theorem of Leon Green; to cover all cases, one needs the more complicated van der Corput argument in our paper.

Outside in

Given that this blog is currently being devoted to a rather intensive study of flows on manifolds, I thought that it might be apropos to highlight an amazing 22-minute video from 1994 on this general topic by the (unfortunately now closed) Geometry Center, entitled “Outside In“, which depicts Smale’s paradox (which asserts that an 2-sphere in three-dimensional space can be smoothly inverted without ever ceasing to be an immersion), following a construction of Thurston (who was credited with the concept for the video). I first saw this video at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin, where it won the first prize at the VideoMath Festival held there. It did a remarkably effective job of explaining the paradox, its resolution in three dimensions, and the lack of a similar paradox in two dimensions, all in a clear and non-technical manner.

A (rather low resolution) copy of the first half of the video can be found here, and the second half can be found here. Some higher resolution short movies of just the inversion process can be found at this Geometry Center page. Finally, the video (and an accompanying booklet with more details and background) can still be obtained today from A K Peters, although I believe the video is only available in the increasingly archaic VHS format.

There are a few other similar such high-quality expository videos of advanced mathematics floating around the internet, but I do not know of any page devoted to collecting such videos. If any readers have their own favourites, you are welcome to post some links or pointers to them here.

285G, Lecture 2: The Ricci flow approach to the Poincaré conjecture

In order to motivate the lengthy and detailed analysis of Ricci flow that will occupy the rest of this course, I will spend this lecture giving a high-level overview of Perelman’s Ricci flow-based proof of the Poincaré conjecture, and in particular how that conjecture is reduced to verifying a number of (highly non-trivial) facts about Ricci flow.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, here is the statement of that conjecture:

Theorem 1. (Poincaré conjecture) Let M be a compact 3-manifold which is simply connected (i.e. it is connected, and every loop is contractible to a point). Then M is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere .

[Unless otherwise stated, all manifolds are assumed to be without boundary.]

I will take it for granted that this result is of interest, but you can read the Notices article of Milnor, the Bulletin article of Morgan, or the Clay Mathematical Institute description of the problem (also by Milnor) for background and motivation for this conjecture. Perelman’s methods also extend to establish further generalisations of the Poincaré conjecture, most notably Thurston’s geometrisation conjecture, but I will focus this course just on the Poincaré conjecture. (On the other hand, the geometrisation conjecture will be rather visibly lurking beneath the surface in the discussion of this lecture.)

PCM article: Differential forms

I’m continuing my series of articles for the Princeton Companion to Mathematics through the holiday season with my article on “Differential forms and integration“. This is my attempt to explain the concept of a differential form in differential geometry and several variable calculus; which I view as an extension of the concept of the signed integral in single variable calculus. I briefly touch on the important concept of de Rham cohomology, but mostly I stick to fundamentals.

I would also like to highlight Doron Zeilberger‘s PCM article “Enumerative and Algebraic combinatorics“. This article describes the art of how to usefully count the number of objects of a given type exactly; this subject has a rather algebraic flavour to it, in contrast with asymptotic combinatorics, which is more concerned with computing the order of magnitude of number of objects in a class. The two subjects complement each other; for instance, in my own work, I have found enumerative and other algebraic methods tend to be useful for controlling “main terms” in a given expression, while asymptotic and other analytic methods tend to be good at controlling “error terms”.

Distinguished Lecture Series III: Shing-Tung Yau, “Application of the Geometric Structures to Solve Problems in Algebraic Geometry and Topology”

On Friday, Yau concluded his lecture series by discussing the PDE approach to constructing geometric structures, particularly Einstein metrics, and their applications to many questions in low-dimensional topology (yes, this includes the Poincaré conjecture). Yau also discussed the situation in high-dimensional topology, which appears to be completely different (and much less well understood).

Yau’s slides for this talk are available here.

Distinguished Lecture Series II: Shing-Tung Yau, “The Basic Tools to Construct Geometric Structures”

On Thursday, Yau continued his lecture series on geometric structures, focusing a bit more on the tools and philosophy that goes into actually building these structures. Much of the philosophy, in its full generality, is still rather vague and not properly formalised, but is nevertheless supported by a large number of rigorously worked out examples and results in special cases. A dominant theme in this talk was the interaction between geometry and physics, in particular general relativity and string theory.

As usual, there are likely to be some inaccuracies in my presentation of Yau’s talk (I am not really an expert in this subject), and corrections are welcome. Yau’s slides for this talk are available here.