Gemma de les Coves

Professor Gemma de les Coves will speak at the IMTECH Colloquium on Wednesday February 25 at 12:30h at Sala d’actes de la Facultat de Matemàtiques i Estadística (FME).

Professor De les Coves is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. She received her BS in Physics at Universitat de Barcelona and her PhD from the University of Innsbruck (Austria) under the supervision of Hans Briegel. She then spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher in Munich, working with Ignacio Cirac on mathematical physics, particularly, quantum many body systems with tensor networks. In 2016, she returned to University of Innsbruck, where she founded her own research group, consolidated in 2020 with the START Prize. Her research focuses on mathematical quantum physics, quantum information, and the universality and unreachability of physical and computational systems, with recent interests extending into philosophy and linguistics.

Title: Universality and unreachability in physics, mathematics, computer science and slightly beyond.

Abstract: Certain statistical physics models are universal (arXiv: 2407.13428) in a similar way to universal Turing machines and the universal approximation theorem for machine learning models. I will share our work to understand the relation between these forms of universality by direct comparison (arXiv:2006.03529, arxiv:2507.07669) and via a categorical framework (arXiv: 2307.06851). I will also talk about their relation to forms of unreachability such as uncomputability or undecidability, which are instances of Lawvere’s fixed point theorem.