Geometry and Combinatorics

Speaker: Tyler Duniasky (Purdue University)

"Cosmological Correlators and Triangulating the Dual Cosmological Polytope"

Time: 15:30

Room: MC 108

A cosmological correlator is an Euler integral, associated to a graph G, which encodes information about the state of the early universe. Evaluation of these integrals is extremely challenging, even in simple cases. However, it turns out the integrand can be identified with the so-called canonical form of the cosmological polytope, revealing a rich combinatorial structure and allowing the application of techniques from commutative algebra. I'll sketch my contribution to this story and advertise the fledgling field of positive geometry, which seeks to generalize the notion of canonical forms to geometric objects more exotic than polytopes.