HSM Early Career Colloquium: Maxine Calle, Max Mihailescu, Seung-Yeon RyooHSM Early Career Colloquium

Wednesday Nov 4, 2026, 3:15 PM → 4:30 PM Europe/Berlin

Endenicher Allee 60/1-016 - Lipschitzsaal (Mathezentrum)

Maxine Calle

How to cut things up (and put them back together again) using algebraic topology

The concept of scissors congruence has a simple premise: given a geometric object, we can cut it up into finitely many pieces, and reassemble these pieces in a new way. But given two geometric objects, how can we tell if they are related in this way? What underlying properties are preserved by these cut-and-paste moves? In this talk, we will explore how algebraic topologists approach these questions, with a particular focus on the case of polytopes and smooth manifolds.

Max Mihailescu 

Random surfaces in statistical mechanics

In the beginning of this talk we will introduce one of the most classical models in statistical mechanics, the Ising model, which explains how temperature influences the magnetic properties of metals. 
At sufficiently low temperatures, two distinct phases emerge, and an interesting research question is studying their separating interface. We will explore how this naturally leads to random surface models, and we will ask a concrete question: How are these surfaces affected when they are constrained to lie between a hard floor and a hard ceiling?

Seung-Yeon Ryoo

Invitation to metric embeddings

We introduce the topic of metric embeddings. More specifically, we ask the meta-question of how to characterize when a metric space embeds bilipschitzly into Euclidean space, and if so, how much we can optimize the embedding. We describe an attempt to answer this question and give some examples where the answer is known.