The Abel Prize is the most prestigious prize in Mathematics. Each year, in anticipation of the prize announcement, an afternnon of lectues showcases previous winners and member of the Committee. This year the event will be held in Oxford on Monday 15th January. Andrew Wiles, John Rognes and Irene Fonseca will be the speakers. Full details below. Everyone welcome. No need to register.
Timetable:
1.00pm: Introductory Remarks by Camilla Serck-Hanssen, the Vice President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
1.10pm - 2.10pm: Andrew Wiles
2.10pm - 2.30pm: Break
2.30pm - 3.30pm: Irene Fonseca
3.30pm - 4.00pm: Tea and Coffee
4.00pm - 5.00pm: John Rognes
Abstracts:
Andrew Wiles: Points on elliptic curves, problems and progress
This will be a survey of the problems concerned with counting points on elliptic curves.
-----
Irene Fonseca: Mathematical Analysis of Novel Advanced Materials
Quantum dots are man-made nanocrystals of semiconducting materials. Their formation and assembly patterns play a central role in nanotechnology, and in particular in the optoelectronic properties of semiconductors. Changing the dots' size and shape gives rise to many applications that permeate our daily lives, such as the new Samsung QLED TV monitor that uses quantum dots to turn "light into perfect color"!
Quantum dots are obtained via the deposition of a crystalline overlayer (epitaxial film) on a crystalline substrate. When the thickness of the film reaches a critical value, the profile of the film becomes corrugated and islands (quantum dots) form. As the creation of quantum dots evolves with time, materials defects appear. Their modeling is of great interest in materials science since material properties, including rigidity and conductivity, can be strongly influenced by the presence of defects such as dislocations.
In this talk we will use methods from the calculus of variations and partial differential equations to model and mathematically analyze the onset of quantum dots, the regularity and evolution of their shapes, and the nucleation and motion of dislocations.
-----
John Rognes: Symmetries of Manifolds
To describe the possible rotations of a ball of ice, three real numbers suffice. If the ice melts, infinitely many numbers are needed to describe the possible motions of the resulting ball of water. We discuss the shape of the resulting spaces of continuous, piecewise-linear or differentiable symmetries of spheres, balls and higher-dimensional manifolds. In the high-dimensional cases the answer turns out to involve surgery theory and algebraic K-theory.