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What opportunities are available outside of academia? What skills beyond strong academic background are companies looking for to be successful in transitioning to industry? Come along and hear from video technology company V-Nova and Dr Anne Wolfes from the Careers Service to get some invaluable advice on careers outside academia.

In this talk, we discuss two-dimensional Riemann problems in the framework of potential flow
equation and isentropic Euler system. We first review recent results on the existence, regularity and properties of
global self-similar solutions involving transonic shocks for several 2D Riemann problems in the
framework of potential flow equation. Examples include regular shock reflection, Prandtl reflection, and four-shocks
Riemann problem. The approach is to reduce the problem to a free boundary problem for a nonlinear elliptic equation
in self-similar coordinates. A well-known open problem is to extend these results to a compressible Euler system,
i.e. to understand the effects of vorticity. We show that for the isentropic Euler system, solutions have
low regularity, specifically velocity and density do not belong to the Sobolev space $H^1$ in self-similar coordinates.  
We further discuss the well-posedness of the transport equation for vorticity in the resulting low regularity setting.

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Accurate interpretation of medical images is crucial for disease diagnosis and treatment, and AI has the potential to minimize errors, reduce delays, and improve accessibility. The focal point of this presentation lies in a grand ambition: the development of 'Generalist Medical AI' systems that can closely resemble doctors in their ability to reason through a wide range of medical tasks, incorporate multiple data modalities, and communicate in natural language. Starting with pioneering algorithms that have already demonstrated their potential in diagnosing diseases from chest X-rays or electrocardiograms, matching the proficiency of expert radiologists and cardiologists, I will delve into the core challenges and advancements in the field. The discussion will navigate towards the topic of label-efficient AI models: with a scarcity of meticulously annotated data in healthcare, the development of AI systems capable of learning effectively from limited labels has become a key concern. In this vein, I'll delve into how the innovative use of self-supervision and pre-training methods has led to algorithmic advancements that can perform high-level diagnostic tasks using significantly less annotated data. Additionally, I will talk about initiatives in data curation, human-AI collaboration, and the creation of open benchmarks to evaluate the generalizability of medical AI algorithms. In sum, this talk aims to deliver a comprehensive picture of the state of 'Generalist Medical AI,' the advancements made, the challenges faced, and the prospects lying ahead.

In this talk I will review how the BV formalism is used in quantizing theories with local gauge symmetries within the framework of perturbative algebraic quantum field theory. The latter is a mathematically rigorous approach to QFT that combines the locality idea going back to Haag and Kastler with Epstein-Glaser renormalization. In my talk I will also show how these methods can also lead to the construction of a factorization algebra.

The Hecke algebra is an algebraic gadget for studying the smooth complex representations of locally profinite groups. We demonstrate the spherical Hecke algebra of GL(n,F) is commutative and present a combinatorial proof of the Satake isomorphism. We apply this to the classification of spherical representations of GL(2,F).

Popular automated market makers (AMMs) use constant function markets (CFMs) to clear the demand and supply in the pool of liquidity. A key drawback in the implementation of CFMs is that liquidity providers (LPs) are currently providing liquidity at a loss, on average. In this paper, we propose two new designs for decentralised trading venues, the arithmetic liquidity pool (ALP) and the geometric liquidity pool (GLP). In both pools, LPs choose impact functions that determine how liquidity taking orders impact the marginal exchange rate of the pool, and set the price of liquidity in the form of quotes around the marginal rate. The impact functions and the quotes determine the dynamics of the marginal rate and the price of liquidity. We show that CFMs are a subset of ALP; specifically, given a trading function of a CFM, there are impact functions and  quotes in the ALP that replicate the marginal rate dynamics and the execution costs in the CFM. For the ALP and GLP, we propose an optimal liquidity provision strategy where the price of liquidity maximises the LP's expected profit and the strategy depends on the LP's (i) tolerance to inventory risk and (ii) views on the demand for liquidity. Our strategies admit closed-form solutions and are computationally efficient.  We show that the price of liquidity in CFMs is suboptimal in the ALP. Also, we give conditions on the impact functions and the liquidity provision strategy to prevent arbitrages from rountrip trades. Finally, we use transaction data from Binance and Uniswap v3 to show that liquidity provision is not a loss-leading activity in the ALP.

This talk will cover the greatest hits of pointwise ergodic theory, beginning with Birkhoff's theorem, then Bourgain's work, and finishing with more modern directions.

Two areas of current research in Mathematical Gauge Theory are the study of higher dimensional instantons on manifolds with special holonomy (for example, Calabi-Yau three folds, G₂ and Spin(7) manifolds), and low dimensional gauge theories (for example the Kapustin-Witten, Haydys-Witten and ADHM Seiberg-Witten equations). A common feature of these two sets of theories is that the moduli spaces of solutions are in general not compact. In both cases, compactness issues arise because of solutions to a certain non-linear equation called the Fueter equation. In this talk, I'll explain how this non compactness gives a relationship between these high and low dimensional gauge theories.

Geometric evolutions can arise as simple models or fundamental building blocks in various applications with moving boundaries and time-dependent domains, such as grain boundaries in materials or deforming cell boundaries. Mesh-based methods require adaptation and smoothing, particularly in the case of strong deformations. We consider finite element schemes based on classical approaches for geometric evolution equations but augmented with the gradient of the Dirichlet energy or a variant of it, which is known to produce a tangential mesh movement beneficial for the mesh quality. We focus on the one-dimensional case, where convergence of semi-discrete schemes can be proved, and discuss two cases. For networks forming triple junctions, it is desirable to keep the impact of any additional, mesh smoothing terms on the geometric evolution as small as possible, which can be achieved with a perturbation approach. Regarding the elastic flow of curves, the Dirichlet energy can serve as a replacement of the usual penalty in terms of the length functional in that, modulo rescaling, it yields the same minimisers in the long run.

Capillary forces acting at the surface of a liquid drop can be strong enough to deform small objects and recent studies have provided several examples of elastic instabilities induced by surface tension. Inspired by the windlass mechanism in spider webs, we present a system where a liquid drop sits on a straight fiber and attracts the fiber which thereby coils inside the drop. We then introduce a 2D extension of the mechanism and build a membrane that can extend/contract by a factor of 20.

The local Kronecker-Weber theorem states that the maximal abelian extension of p-adic numbers Q_p is obtained from this field by adjoining all roots of unity. In 2018, Koenigsmann conjectured that the maximal abelian extension of Q_p is decidable. In my talk, we will discuss Koenigsmann's proposed axiomatisation. In contrast, the maximal unramified extension of Q_p is known to be decidable, admitting a complete axiomatisation by an informed but simple set of axioms (this is due to Kochen). We explain how the question of completeness can be reduced to an Ax-Kochen-Ershov result in residue characteristic 0 by the method of coarsening.

Named after mathematical physicists Kubo, Martin, and Schwinger, KMS states are a special class of states on any C$^*$-algebra admitting a continuous action of the real numbers. Unlike in the case of von Neumann algebras, where each modular flow has a unique KMS state, the collection of KMS states for a given flow on a C$^*$-algebra can be quite intricate. In this talk, I will explain what abstract properties these simplices have and show how one can realise such a simplex on various classes of simple C$^*$-algebras.

The vacant set of the random walk on the torus undergoes a percolation phase transition at Poissonian timescales in dimensions 3 and higher. The talk will review this phenomenon and discuss recent progress regarding the nature of the transition, both for this model and its infinite-volume limit, the vacant set of random interlacements, introduced by Sznitman in Ann. Math., 171 (2010), 2039–2087. The discussion will lead up to recent progress regarding the long purported equality of several critical parameters naturally associated to the transition. 

I will talk about two separate projects where random walks are building a random tree, yielding preferential attachment behaviour from completely local mechanisms.
First, the Tree Builder Random Walk is a randomly growing tree, built by a walker as she is walking around the tree. At each time $n$, she adds a leaf to her current vertex with probability $n^{-\gamma}, \gamma\in(2/3, 1]$, then moves to a uniform random neighbor on the possibly modified tree. We show that the tree process at its growth times, after a random finite number of steps, can be coupled to be identical to the Barabási-Albert preferential attachment tree model. This coupling implies that many properties known for the BA-model, such as diameter and degree distribution, can be directly transferred to our model. Joint work with János Engländer, Giulio Iacobelli, and Rodrigo Ribeiro. Second, we introduce a network-of-networks model for physical networks: we randomly grow subgraphs of an ambient graph (say, a box of $\mathbb{Z}^d$) until they hit each other, building a tree from how these spatially extended nodes touch each other. We compute non-rigorously the degree distribution exponent of this tree in large generality, and provide a rigorous analysis when the nodes are loop-erased random walks in dimension $d=2$ or $d\geq 5$, using a connection with the Uniform Spanning Tree. Joint work with Ádám Timár, Sigurdur Örn Stefánsson, Ivan Bonamassa, and Márton Pósfai. (See https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01583)

The celebrated Kirchberg-Phillips classification theorem classifies so-called Kirchberg algebras by K-theory. Many examples of Kirchberg algebras can be constructed via the crossed product construction starting from a group action on a compact space. One might ask: When exactly does the crossed product construction produce a Kirchberg algebra? In joint work with Gardella, Geffen, and Naryshkin, we obtained a dynamical answer to this question for a large class of nonamenable groups which we call "groups with paradoxical towers". Our class includes many non-positively curved groups such as acylindrically hyperbolic groups and lattices in Lie groups. I will try to advertise our notion of paradoxical towers, outline how we use it, and pose some open questions.

We show that given $m$ disjoint chains in the Boolean lattice, we can create $m$ disjoint skipless chains that cover the same elements (where we call a chain skipless if any two consecutive elements differ in size by exactly one). By using this result we are able to answer two conjectures about the asymptotics of induced saturation numbers for the antichain, which are defined as follows. For positive integers $k$ and $n$, a family $\mathcal{F}$ of subsets of $\{1,\dots,n\}$ is $k$-antichain saturated if it does not contain an antichain of size $k$ (as induced subposet), but adding any set to $\mathcal{F}$ creates an antichain of size $k$. We use $\textrm{sat}^{\ast}(n,k)$ to denote the smallest size of such a family. With more work we pinpoint the exact value of $\textrm{sat}^{\ast}(n,k)$, for all $k$ and sufficiently large $n$. Previously, exact values for $\textrm{sat}^{\ast}(n,k)$ were only known for $k$ up to 6. We also show that for any poset $\mathcal{P}$, its induced saturation number (which is defined similar as for the antichain) grows at most polynomially: $\textrm{sat}^{\ast}(n, \mathcal{P})=O(n^c)$, where $c \leq |\mathcal{P}|^2/4+1$. This is based on joint works with Carla Groenland, Maria-Romina Ivan, Hugo Jacob and Tom Johnston.

Let w(x_1,...,x_r) be a word in a free group. For any group G, w induces a word map w:G^r-->G. For example, the commutator word w=xyx^(-1)y^(-1) induces the commutator map. If G is finite, one can ask what is the probability that w(g_1,...,g_r)=e, for a random tuple (g_1,...,g_r) of elements in G.

In the setting of finite simple groups, Larsen and Shalev showed there exists epsilon(w)>0 (depending only on w), such that the probability that w(g_1,...,g_r)=e is smaller than |G|^(-epsilon(w)), whenever G is large enough (depending on w).

In this talk, I will discuss analogous questions for compact groups, with a focus on the family of unitary groups; For example, given r independent Haar-random n by n unitary matrices A_1,...,A_r, what is the probability that w(A_1,...,A_r) is contained in a small ball around the identity matrix?

Based on a joint work with Nir Avni and Michael Larsen.  

I will review some aspects of gravity in asymptotically flat spacetime and mention important challenges to obtain a holographic description in this framework. I will then present two important approaches towards flat space holography, namely Carrollian and celestial holography, and explain how they are related to each other. Similarities and differences between flat and anti-de Sitter spacetimes will be emphasized throughout the talk. 
 

As part of the internal seminar schedule for Stochastic Analysis for this coming term, DPhil students have been invited to present on their works to date. Student talks are 20 minutes, which includes question and answer time. 

Students presenting are:

Sara-Jean Meyer, supervisor Massimiliano Gubinelli

Satoshi Hayakawa, supervisor Harald Oberhauser 

I will present some results from the newly developed theory of wavelets; based on the joint work with the following authors:

P.M. Luthy, H.Šikić, F.Soria, G.L.Weiss, E.N.Wilson.One-DimensionalDyadic Wavelets.Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 280 (2022), no 1378, ix+152 pp.

About two and a half decades ago and based on the influential book by Fernandez and Weiss, an approach was developed to study wavelets from the point of view of their connections with Fourier analysis. The idea was to study wavelets and other reproducing function systems via the four basic equations that characterized various properties of wavelet systems, like frame and basis properties, completeness, orthogonality, etc. Despite hundreds of research papers and the impressive development of the theory of such systems, some questions remain open even in the basic case of dyadic wavelets on the real line. Among the most thorough treatments that we provide in this lengthy paper is the issue of the understanding of the low-pass filters associated with the MRA structure. In this talk, I will focus on some of these results. As it turned out, a more general and abstract approach to the problem, using the study of dyadic orbits and the newly introduced Tauberian function, reveals several interesting properties and opens an interesting context for some older results

For many spaces of interest to number theorists one can construct cycles which in some ways behave like the coefficients of modular forms. The aim of this talk is to give an introduction to this idea by focusing on examples coming from modular curves and Heegner points and the relevant work of Zagier, Gross-Kohnen-Zagier and Borcherds. If time permits I will discuss generalizations to other spaces.