Traditional architecture in the Shantou area

Dates: 1–26 September 2026
Venue: Guangdong Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (GTIIT), Shantou, China

During September we will have a small informal workshop at GTIIT, with about ten participants coming at different times during the month.

The main topics will be combinatorics, sandpiles, tropical geometry, and elementary number theory, with related subjects very welcome. We expect to have many talks and, equally importantly, plenty of time for informal discussions and working sessions.

The workshop is deliberately informal. Many of the talks will be about work in progress, unfinished projects, open questions, preliminary ideas, or introductory material, rather than polished final results. The aim is to create an environment in which it is easy to develop ideas together.

Format and possible topics

Each visitor will be invited to give a talk introducing their current research, and I will present several projects and open problems that I would particularly like to discuss with the participants. We expect approximately 2–3 hours of talks per day, leaving substantial time for discussions and joint work.

Among the topics I plan to discuss is a tropical approach to the Monge–Ampère equation, related to this recent preprint. It would be particularly useful if someone could give an introductory talk on the classical Monge–Ampère equation, its geometric meaning and applications, or on numerical methods for solving Monge–Ampère equations. If you would like to volunteer for such a talk, please let me know; I can suggest some papers and background material.

Another theme will come from sandpiles and 2-adic phenomena. We will discuss an unexpected connection with Chebyshev polynomials and their arithmetic, including divisibility and congruence phenomena, 2-adic properties, and related questions in elementary number theory. An introductory talk on Chebyshev polynomials and their number-theoretic aspects would therefore fit very naturally into the programme.

Most importantly, talks do not have to present finished work. Introductions to a subject, work in progress, computations, conjectures, open problems, incomplete arguments, and ideas that one would like to discuss with other participants are all particularly welcome.

Talks and discussions will be announced on this page as they are scheduled. The programme will therefore evolve throughout September.

Students are very welcome. If you know students or colleagues who might be interested in attending some of the talks or discussions, please send them this page (and I can add them to the corresponding wechat group).

Schedule

The schedule will be updated as talks and discussion sessions are confirmed.

Date Time Speaker Title / topic
TBA TBA TBA TBA

Talks, discussions, materials

Details and abstracts will be added here as they become available.

Participants

The list of participants will be updated as further visits are confirmed.

Dates Participant Affiliation / status Research interests
1–11 September Elizaveta Iarovikova Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT); Master’s student and Teaching Assistant Extremal combinatorics, graph theory, linear-algebraic methods in combinatorics
1–4 September Maxim Klimenko Laboratory of Discrete and Combinatorial Optimization, MIPT; second-year Master’s student Algorithms, discrete geometry, computational complexity, extremal combinatorics
1–11 September Andrey Kupavskii Head of the Laboratory of Combinatorial and Geometric Structures, MIPT Extremal combinatorics, discrete and computational geometry, probabilistic methods, analysis of Boolean functions
1–11 September Yakov Shubin Laboratory of Combinatorial and Geometric Structures, MIPT; third-year PhD student Extremal combinatorics, Johnson schemes, discrete geometry
1–11 September Georgy Sokolov Laboratory of Discrete and Combinatorial Optimization, MIPT; second-year PhD student Extremal and geometric combinatorics, graph theory
1–11 September Nikolai Terekhov Laboratory of Combinatorial and Geometric Structures, MIPT; second-year PhD student Extremal combinatorics, weak saturation, graphs and hypergraphs
7–26 September Artem Beliakov Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria  
7–26 September Mikhail Shkolnikov Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria Tropical geometry, sandpiles, geometry and topology
7–26 September Peter Petrov Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria Tropical geometry, phase tropicalization
8–26 September Samuel Jean Felix Dentan Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria  

More details will be announced on this page.

Organiser: Nikita Kalinin (GTIIT)

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Mathematical cinema (in the sense of Ernesto Lupercio) should be a place we enter and play in, rather than another format in which finished mathematics is displayed. A mathematical workshop, seminar, or theater should let us inhabit a way of thinking: draw the pictures, compute examples, make conjectures, try the wrong proof, discover why it fails, change representations, argue at the blackboard, ask the naïve question, use computation or AI to push beyond what we can immediately see, and then return to the object until its structure becomes our own. The aim is not primarily to produce papers but to transmit and practise ways of seeing—so that another mathematician can learn the moves, develop the taste, recognize the obstructions, and eventually continue the mathematics without its originator. Proof remains essential, but the polished theorem–proof sequence is only one trace left by this larger activity. In such a mathematical cinema, papers come as a side effect: durable records deposited by a living practice whose real product is mathematicians capable of seeing, questioning, and carrying the mathematics further.