Welcome

Research Interests

My research focuses on arithmetic structures in dense sets of integers and combines Fourier analytic, combinatorial and probabilistic methods. It is part of a thriving area called arithmetic combinatorics, a subject that includes many beautiful results such as the Green-Tao Theorem on long arithmetic progressions in the primes. It has close connections with parts of ergodic theory and theoretical computer science.

Contact

Publications | Talks | Curriculum Vitae | MAT 562 | GTCA | CAPARIS 2012

Latest News

2nd November 2011

I am organizing a study group on arithmetic combinatorics (GTCA), open to all interested mathematicians in the Paris area. It will be held every other Tuesday at 4pm. For more information, see this new page.

14th July 2011

Together with Alain Plagne, Eric Balandraud, Benjamin Girard and Wolfgang Schmid I am organizing a week-long conference entitled Additive Combinatorics in Paris 2012, to be held in memory of Yahya ould Hamidoune at the Institut Henri Poincaré during the second week of July next year. We have an amazing list of keynote speakers lined up, and hope that many of you will be able to participate. An official announcement will be sent out a few weeks from now. For more information, including a registration form, please visit our website.

24th May 2011

Madhur Tulsiani and I have uploaded our paper "Quadratic Goldreich-Levin Theorems" to the arXiv. We give an algorithmic version of the U^3 inverse theorem and various refinements thereof, allowing us to compute for the fist time the large "quadratic Fourier coefficients" of a given bounded function. For an extended abstract and further links see my preprints page.

24th November 2010

From personal experience I know that the French academic system can seem rather intransparent and impenetrable from the outside. I have therefore listed some opportunities for young mathematicians to spend some time in France to pursue their research interests on this new page.

28th July 2010

As of the start of the academic year, I will be a Hadamard Associate Professor at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. As a result this website will probably soon experience a linguistic transformation.
I intend to return to the US periodically in the near future. If you are interested in my travel schedule you can take an educated guess on the basis of my talk and conference announcements, or simply email me.

10th February 2010

Three new joint papers with Tim Gowers have found their way onto the arXiv today. We give a strong quadratic decomposition theorem in both vector spaces over finite fields (arXiv:1002.2209) and the cyclic group modulo a prime (arXiv:1002.2210), as well as a general regularity-type decomposition into polynomial phases in the former setting (arXiv:1002.2208). As a consequence we are able to prove the general case of an earlier conjecture of ours regarding the true complexity of a system of linear forms. For more details please see Papers and Preprints.

8th January 2010

I'll be teaching a graduate course entitled 592: Topics in Probability and Ergodic Theory this semester, with emphasis on arithmetic structures in subsets of the integers and the primes.

The course is suitable for any graduate student with an interest in number theory, harmonic analysis or combinatorics. We shall explore various approaches to establishing the existence of arithmetic structure in arbitrary subsets of the integers and the primes. These approaches include purely combinatorial methods, analytic techniques as well as a thorough discussion from a dynamical systems point of view.

A preliminary list of topics is available from the course webpage, which will be expanded in due course.

2nd November 2009

On Thursday, November 5 I'll be giving a lecture in the series 'Mathematical Careers and Ideas' for undergraduates at Rutgers. My title will be Calculus against the swine flu: modelling the spread of infectious disease. Epidemiology is certainly not my speciality, but it doesn't take much calculus to draw some interesting and sometimes counterintuitive conclusions about the spread of influenza (and similar diseases). There is free pizza after the talk! Please click on the link above for further details.

1st July 2009

My teaching pages have been updated. In particular, there is a new section entitled Student Resources, which contains what I believe to be useful links and information for mathematically inclined students at Rutgers and elsewhere. Also, I have made some preliminary information available on 477: Mathematical Theory of Probability and 152: Calculus II for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences, which I will be teaching at Rutgers in the fall.

28th June 2009

Having neglected my violin for a few months, I am excited to announce that I'll be part of the Mercury Orchestra's second summer season.

Mercury Orchestra
Channing Yu, conductor
Saturday, 18th July at 8pm
Harvard Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts
 
Strauss - Don Juan
Mahler - Symphonie No. 5

Tickets are now on sale online at the Harvard Box Office.

20th May 2009

For experimental purposes I have installed jsMath on my Preprints page, which may now display a font warning when you visit for the first time. The idea is that jsMath displays mathematical symbols flexibly and much better than ordinary html, so I thought I'd give this a go. Feedback is always welcome.

5th March 2009

A long overdue overhaul of this website has taken place in order to create room for more mathematics. My private pages are temporarily unavailable.

3rd February 2009

The Discrete Math Seminar at Rutgers has its own webpage this semester. The program is now finalised and includes speakers and abstracts through the end of April.

5th October 2008

Ben Green and I have submitted a short note on Elkin's improvement of Behrend's construction to the arXiv:0810.0732.

26th September 2008

I do not get to vote in this country. Please do it for me.

1st August 2008

This summer I have been involved as a mentor in the Summer Program for Undergraduate Research SPUR at MIT. Both my students Cordelia Link and Yuncheng Lin won a Rogers Family Award for their projects, details of which will be made available in the near future. Watch this space.

30th June 2008

A program of 20th century French classics with pianist Albert Kim and the Mercury Orchestra in the heart of Harvard Square.

Mercury Orchestra
Saturday, 19th July at 8pm
Harvard Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts
 
Ravel - La Valse
Ravel - Piano Concerto in G Major
Debussy - La Mer

Tickets are now on sale online at the Harvard Box Office. Out of all orchestras I've ever played with, this one has by far the largest and best viola section. (I expect that especially musical readers from Cambridge, UK, will appreciate the content of this statement!)

24th June 2008

This coming weekend I'll be performing with the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra in a summer pops concert hosted by Harvard's JFK School of Government.

Cambridge Symphony Orchestra
Sunday, 29th June at 3pm
JFK Lawn in Cambridge, Massachusetts
In case of rain: The Greater Boston Vineyard Church, 170 Rindge Ave. (near Davis Sq.)

The program includes Copland's Lincoln Portrait, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, StarWars, The Washington Post March and The Ride of the Valkyries amongst many other popular classics. Admission is free. Come along!

20th June 2008

This summer I am teaching Advanced Calculus at MIT as part of the MITES 2008 program. Further details are available from my teaching page.

13th February 2008

My fate for the coming academic year has been decided: During the fall I will be a postdoctoral fellow attending the program Ergodic Theory and Additive Combinatorics at MSRI in Berkeley. In January I'll be taking up an assistant professorship at Rutgers University. Some might simply call it a postdoc.

8th February 2008

I am co-organizing a series of seminars at the IAS this term, mainly of an ergodic theory/analysis flavour. A preliminary list of speakers and abstracts can be found under Mathematics - IAS Analysis Seminar.

1st November 2007

My joint paper with Tim Gowers on 'The true complexity of a system of linear equations' appeared on the arXiv today. The abstract is available in the section Mathematics - Preprints, which also contains a link to the arXiv download for the paper.

5th September 2007

My new contact details can be found in the section About Me - Contact. I have completed my move to Princeton, NJ, where I will be a member of the Institute for Advanced Study until May 2008.

10th June 2007

I have signed up to run 5K in this year's 'Race for Life' in Cambridge on Sunday, 8th July. OK, it's not a marathon. If you'd still like to sponsor me (in aid of 'Cancer Research UK'), you can do so at www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/juliawolf until 22nd July 2007.

3rd June 2007

My website is back after lying dormant for over a year. To provide a certain amount of continuity, many news items from the previous incarnation of this website have remained on this page. The layout has changed very little, although you will find that a number of sections are now password-protected.

27th June 2005

Yet another one, but possibly my last one for quite some time:

Cambridge Graduate Orchestra
Sunday 10th July
7:30pm in Trinity College Chapel
 
Sarasate - Zigeunerweisen
Montsalvatge - Cinco Canciones Negras
Saint-Saens - Symphony No. 3

Come. Tickets available on the door or online. For more details see the website www.cambridgegraduateorchestra.com or have a look at the poster!

13th February 2005

I had given up advertising concerts that I am playing in, but the following event marks an exception:

Cambridge Graduate Orchestra
Monday 7th March
8pm at West Road Concert Hall
 
Schnittke - (K)ein Sommernachtstraum
Rachmaninoff - Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Rimsky-Korsakov - Scheherazade

This is a truly wonderful programme, and it would be great to have a good audience! For more details, or to purchase tickets online, visit www.cambridgegraduateorchestra.com.

On a slightly different (and more scientific) note, it has been brought to my attention that the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge is currently running a project entitled Is there a maths gene?. Whatever your level of mathematical ability, click on the link above to participate in the high-profile survey (you may have seen parts of it in The Guardian). You will be entered into a draw to win tickets to Trinity May Ball, it's fun and they even tell you your score and promise to inform you of the overall result of the experiment - go on!

19th October 2004

New stuff!

I've added pictures from the AIM workshop in San Francisco (Photographs - San Francisco) and my trip to Chile (Photographs - Chile). There is also a new page with links to some of my friends' pages (About Me - Friends). If you are supervised by me, you might like to check out the updated section Mathematics - For Supervisees. And finally, tickets for the Clare College Music Society Michaelmas Term Concert are on sale now! For more details click here.

3rd May 2004

I shall abuse this space to advertise two concerts that I will be playing in over the next few weeks.

Orchestra on the Hill
Saturday 8th May
8pm in the New Hall Dome
 
Elgar - Pomp and Circumstance Marches No. 1 - 5
Haydn - Nelson Mass

and

Clare College Music Society May Week Concert
Sunday 13th June
7pm in Clare College, Dining Hall
 
Schumann - Genoveva Overture
Mozart - Sinfonia Concertante
Strauss - Der Abend
Britten - A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra
More details at CCMS May Week Concert - tickets usually sell out phenomenally fast!

10th April 2004

Many pages have been updated over the past few days, take a look!

26th January 2004

On Monday, 2nd February I will be giving a joint talk (with Sir Nicholas Barrington) on 'The Fascination of Numbers'.
It will take place in the Thirkill Room in Clare Old Court, starting at 8:30pm.
If you plan to attend, you are kindly requested to email the President of the Dilettante Society, Richard West.

I will also be singing in Clare's Lent Term concert:

Mozart's Requiem
Friday 13th February
8pm at West Road Concert Hall

26th September 2003

The big news is that (after many attempts and compromises) I have finally managed to set up this website!
If nothing else, I hope it provides some useful links to other people's pages on the web. I would also like to apologise for the fact that some places of this website are still under construction - more content will be added soon.
Comments of any kind are always appreciated, so please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Julia

PS: If you can't see a menu on the left but would like to see one, please enable JavaScript.
If the page does not display properly, you are probably using an ancient version of Netscape. Please notify me of this occurrence.