Mathematics & Statistics Graduate Student Seminar - Renaud Raquépas

Quantum stuff, but with no cats:

The word "quantum" is great for coming up with impressive advertising campaigns, getting points when playing Scrabble, and scoring likes on posts about consciousness and vibes, but it is overall poorly understood. We will try to shed some light on this buzzword, at least as far as the basic math is concerned. We will focus on the role of noncommutativity in the theory of quantum mechanics. For the pure math students, there will be stars and words that end in "-morphism"; for the applied math people, one or two differential equations; for the statisticians, Kullback-Leibler divergences.