I will discuss some recent work on the distribution of rational points on the unit sphere and related conjectures.
We'll describe some ongoing discussions and visuals around a beautiful example of Francois Ledrappier, known as the 3-dots example. We'll explain the connection between this example and Laurent series over finite fields, which we learned from Doug Lind, and explain some ongoing work on understanding periodic objects with Aaron Abrams, Edmund Harriss, and Glen Whitney.
Jointly with Tariq Osman, we completed the classification of the tail behaviour of the limiting distributions of all quadratic Weyl sums of the form 1/\sqrt{N} \sum_{n=1}^N e( ((1/2)n^2+\beta n)x+\alpha n).
When \alpha and \beta are both rational, while trying to understand the contribution of certain orbits to the heavy tails, we discovered that some pairs actually lead to a compactly...
Shimura varieties are notoriously complex objects; the very definition of a Shimura variety is typically avoided in a research presentation, lest the entire talk is eaten up by the details. In this talk, I will share some of my attempts at visualizing Shimura varieties, ranging from the modular curve to higher dimensional Shimura varieties in characteristic p. Prior exposure to Shimura...
In 2018 Demonet et al observed that there is essentially only one three-dimensional positive integer tiling with the property that each cross-section is an SL2-tiling (in which all squares have determinant 1). Inspired by Bhargava’s work on binary quadratic forms, we describe a model for the more general class of three-dimensional integer tilings, which we call hypertilings, with the property...
I will report on two stories when illustration happened without my conscious participation. The first story is elementary and concerns tilings on the plane. The second one is about friezes on surfaces (a generalization of Conway-Coxeter's frieze patterns) and hyperbolic geometry. This second story is based on the joined work with Pavel Tumarkin (see arXiv:2410.13511).