Pictures from Our 2024 Annual Meeting of the Israel Mathematical Union and Student Day

To me and to many mathematicians in Israel, the Annual meeting of the Israeli Mathematical Union is a dear event and we try to take part. (Here we briefly described the 2017 meeting in Acre, and here the 2014 meeting in Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan.)  In recent years, there was an extra day of students talks. Here are some pictures from the events this year at the Weizmann Institute (and a few additional picture). I took pictures of three main lectures and there were dozens of additional lectures. 

On the train to Rehovot I met Itai Benjamini

Day I: Misha Sodin’s and Amir Abboud’s lectures

Misha Sodin‘s lecture

Misha started his lecture with some sad notes about the hopes of yesterday and the reality of today. He then continued to discuss a fascinating problem in harmonic analysis arising from a discovery of Radchenko and Viazovska. 

The starting point for Misha’s lecture was the magic function discovered by Viazovska in her proof for the densest sphere packing in eight dimensions. (I wrote about it in this post.) In 2017 Radchenko and Viazovska discovered a remarkable uniqueness result in terms of conditions for the “physical” and Fourier properties of functions. The question was to understand the general Fourier-theoretic phenomenon behind the theorem. 

Amir Abboud’s lecture

Amir Abboud is the recipient of the Erdos Prize 2024. Here he gets the prize from Gideon Schechtman the IMU president. The lecture was about fine-grained complexity a remarkable area of computational complexity where Amir is a major player. Surprisingly fine grained complexity (which talks about what we cannot do) have led to major new algorithms as well.

Bus number 189

On the way back I took the long long bus 189 from the train station to my home. I am often joking that getting off the rear door gets me half way home, and following this joke it gives me much satisfaction when this happens.  

Yoga at the Tel Aviv beach

In the evening I saw a huge public yoga lesson on the beach.

Intermission: Shaking hands with my 7-month old grandson Yonatan

Day II:

Here I am with Mark Shusterman and  Danny Neftin.

The audience in Lior’s lecture: because of the large audience we had to move between three lecture halls

Lior Yanovski’s lecture

Gal Binyamini and Lior Yanovski

Lior Yanovski’s lecture sounds like music to me and I even shared four short videos over Facebook.

We start with the natural numbers ,  but then why do we need subtraction? The categorical answer is that this allows you Euler  characteristic (Video I), and why do we need divisions? it allows averaging which is crucial in representation theory, and algebraic closure? Algebraic closure allows you to have root of unity! (Video II)  and group rings and representation. Actually there is a category that comes just before   Here it is! (Video III) To work with this category you need coherence (somehow I was reminded of the associahedron) and next came classifying space and loop spaces and  spectra and all sort of things. 

The videos are not perfect but it is much improved compared to one high school graduation ceremony of one of my children where watching the 60 minute video (that I took) you could see repeatedly the phone being taken out from my pocket while the  recording is stopped and then the video starts recording just when it is going back to my pocket. (My explanation that this was a simple error was not very successful.) 

Wednesday: with Moshe Rosenfeld

With Moshe Rosenfeld (see this post, and this one). Can you identify the book on the table?