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Covers a list of topics in mathematical physics. The specific topics may vary from year to year, depending on the instructor's discretion. Background in graduate level probability theory and analysis is desirable.

Version I of this lecture course was offered a year ago. This version II will have about half of its material overlapping with version I; the rest will be created afresh The purpose, as in last year, is to show beautiful surprises and instructive paradoxes in a maximal diversity of fluid phenomena, and to understand them with minimal models. The prerequisites are fluency in the so-called `mathematical methods¿, plus ability to think physics at the advanced undergraduate level. We emphasize that this is a graduate course, and an undergraduate may enroll exceptionally only after passing a written test by the lecturer. nnNOTE: Undergraduates require instructor permission to enroll. Undergraduates interested in taking the course should contact the instructor for permission, providing information about relevant background such as performance in prior coursework, reading, etc.

The theory of surfaces and 3-manifolds. Curves on surfaces, the classification of diffeomorphisms of surfaces, and Teichmuller space. The mapping class group and the braid group. Knot theory, including knot invariants. Decomposition of 3-manifolds: triangulations, Heegaard splittings, Dehn surgery. Loop theorem, sphere theorem, incompressible surfaces. Geometric structures, particularly hyperbolic structures on surfaces and 3-manifolds. May be repeated for credit up to 6 total units.

Homotopy groups, fibrations, spectral sequences, simplicial methods, Dold-Thom theorem, models for loop spaces, homotopy limits and colimits, stable homotopy theory. May be repeated for credit up to 6 total units.nnNOTE: Undergraduates require instructor permission to enroll. Undergraduates interested in taking the course should contact the instructor for permission, providing information about relevant background such as performance in prior coursework, reading, etc.

Possible topics: principal bundles, vector bundles, classifying spaces. Connections on bundles, curvature. Topology of gauge groups and gauge equivalence classes of connections. Characteristic classes and K-theory, including Bott periodicity, algebraic K-theory, and indices of elliptic operators. Spectral sequences of Atiyah-Hirzebruch, Serre, and Adams. Cobordism theory, Pontryagin-Thom theorem, calculation of unoriented and complex cobordism. May be repeated for credit up to 6 total units.

NOTE: Undergraduates require instructor permission to enroll. Undergraduates interested in taking the course should contact the instructor for permission, providing information about relevant background such as performance in prior coursework, reading, etc.

Topics of contemporary interest in differential geometry. May be repeated for credit.nnNOTE: Undergraduates require instructor permission to enroll. Undergraduates interested in taking the course should contact the instructor for permission, providing information about relevant background such as performance in prior coursework, reading, etc.

Only for mathematics graduate students. Students obtain employment in a relevant industrial or research activity to enhance their professional experience. Students submit a concise report detailing work activities, problems worked on, and key results. May be repeated for credit up to 3 units. Prerequisite: qualified offer of employment and consent of department. Prior approval by Math Department is required; you must contact the Math Department's Student Services staff for instructions before being granted permission to enroll.

This course is a series of case-studies in doing applied mathematics on surprising phenomena we notice in daily life. Almost every class will show demos of these phenomena (toys and magic) and suggest open projects. The topics range over a great variety and cut across areas traditionally pigeonholed as physics, biology, engineering, computer science, mathematics ¿ but, instead of developing sophisticated mathematics on simple material, our aim is to extract simple mathematical understanding from sophisticated material which, at first, we may not yet know how to pigeonhole. In each class I will try to make the discussion self-contained and to give everybody something to take home, regardless of the background.