Michael Bradford Williams

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Research

Previously, I was a geometric analyst whose research addressed various questions related to PDE on Riemannian manifolds, especially Ricci flow. Roughly stated, these questions involve the following fundamental issues:

My published research papers:

  1. Solvsolitons associated with Heisenberg algebras, Results. Math. (2014) 65: 155.
  2. Explicit Ricci solitons on nilpotent Lie groups, J Geom Anal (2013) 23: 47.
  3. Linear stability of algebraic Ricci solitons, with Michael Jablonski and Peter Petersen Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik (Crelles Journal), Volume 2016, Issue 713, Pages 181–224.
  4. Dynamical stability of algebraic Ricci solitons, with Haotian Wu, Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik (Crelles Journal), Volume 2016, Issue 713, Pages 225–243.
  5. Results on coupled Ricci and harmonic map flows, Advances in Geometry, Volume 15, Issue 1, Pages 7–26.

Other preprints:

  1. On the Linear Stability of Expanding Ricci Solitons, with Michael Jablonski and Peter Petersen.
  2. Stability of solutions of certain extended Ricci flow systems.

I graduated in May, 2011 from UT Austin, under the supervision of Dan Knopf.

My Ph.D. dissertation:

Mathematical Notes

Here are a few (mostly serious) math-related things.

groupoids

Here is an expository paper that I wrote for a Lie Groups class, concerning groupoids.

collapse

Here is another expository paper that I wrote for a Geometry class, this time concerning collapse in Riemannian geometry.

the normalized Ricci flow

Here are notes from my oral candidacy exam. I presented the main ideas from this paper, which uses the Ricci flow to classify certain types of manifolds.

two pairs of pants

I participated in transcribing a series of lectures on Topological Quantum Field Theory and the Cobordism Hypothesis, give by Jacob Lurie. Videos of the lectures, which were part of the Persepctive in Geometry lecture series, are also available.

More Notes

Here are a few expository items related to my past teaching.

Cantor's diagonalization argument

What is infinity? How many infinities are there? Infinitely many! I wrote another short note that introduces the concept of cardinality and proves a few facts about it. It is written at a basic level, and does not assume much knowledge of mathematics beyond basic facts about sets and functions.

the limit of the ratio of consecutive fibonacci terms is the golden ratio

I wrote a short note that proves a few interesting facts about the Fibonacci sequence. It should be understandable to anyone who knows calculus and basic linear algebra.

real analysis flow chart

I taught an undergraduate real analysis course, which covered the basics of converegent sequences, continuity, differentiability, and integrability. I created a flow chart that shows how the main definitions and theorems depend on each other.

Khinchine's constant

I wrote another short note that explains one of my favorite numbers, Khinchin's constant. This number is the geometric mean of the denominators in the continued fraction representation of almost every real number!

the Petersen graph is not planar

I taught a course in discrete mathematics, and we proved that the famous Petersen graph is not planar. Here is the proof.

complex mappings

I created some animations to help visualize certain complex mappings. (See also this demo.)

Other Stuff

A few more curiousities.

What is the universal cover of this topological space?

Richard P. Feynman

Richard P. Feynman is approximately the man. Here's an amazing speech given to the National Academy of Sciences in 1955.

Paul Erdos

Also the man: Paul Erdos, the Kevin Bacon of Mathematics. Here is perhaps the first published reference to the Erdos number, appearing in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1969. Erdos himself replied to the short article by, unsuprisingly, doing real mathematics with the Erdos number. My own Erdos number is 4.