12:00
This is another opportunity to hear the 2013 LMS Presidential Address:
Abstract: The idea of space is central to the way we think. It is the technology we have evolved for interpreting our experience of the world. But space is presumably a human creation, and even inside mathematics it plays a variety of different roles, some modelling our intuition very closely and some seeming almost magical. I shall point out how the homotopy category in particular breaks away from its own roots. Then I shall describe how quantum theory leads us beyond the well-established notion of a topological space into the realm of noncommutative geometry. One might think that noncommutative spaces are not very space-like, and yet it is noncommutativity that makes the world look as it does to us, as a collection of point particles.