If this warm weather continues, the Senior Proctor's approval for amendments to academic dress requirements might continue into next week's exams. You may bring still water to the exam room in a clear bottle.
The Senior Proctor has advised that if the heat wave continues into next week, academic dress can be relaxed but only inside the Exam Room to:
We are delighted to introduce our latest exhibition in the Andrew Wiles Building, featuring 30 mathematically-inspired paintings by Dutch visual artist Paul Ouwerkerk.
The exhibition launch will be on Friday 5th June at 5 p.m. in the South Mezzanine and all are welcome. Please email Dyrol if you wish to attend.
I will give a short introduction to knotted surfaces in 4-space and discuss some recent developments. First, I will give some motivation, briefly discuss methods for distinguishing knotted surfaces (such as the Khovanov TQFT), and talk about connections with 4-manifolds. Then, I will introduce Artin’s spinning construction, variants of which were defined by Zeeman, Fox, Litherland, and Price-Roseman. Finally, I will specialize to knotted RP^2’s in S^4 and construct a knotted RP^2 in S^4 that cannot be decomposed as the connected sum of an unknotted RP^2 and a knotted S^2. This last result on RP^2’s is joint with Hughes, Kim, and Miller.
Massimiliano Gubinelli has been awarded the 2026 XL Medal for Mathematics by Accademia Nazionale Delle Scienze, Italy's national Academy of Science which was founded in Verona in 1782.
Max is our Wallis Professor of Mathematics, Head of the Stochastic Analysis Group and a Fellow at St Anne's College.
In this talk, I will focus on a new construction of boundary correlators (or wavefunction coefficients in dS) that highlights simplicity at all spins and automatically imposes the conservation of boundary currents. This new construction is formulated in twistor space, a complex projective space that encodes solutions to equations of motion as holomorphic data. This is done via an isomorphism called the Penrose transform. First, I will discuss the case of AdS_3 and AdS_5, where bulk-to-boundary correlators naturally arise in minitwistor space. Then, I will show how in (A)dS₄ one can construct bulk correlation functions using only twistors, dual twistors, and the infinity twistor as building blocks. The relation to coordinate space arises now via nested Penrose transforms. The boundary limit of these correlators yields CFT correlators/wavefunction coefficients that satisfy the expected Ward identities. Finally, I will briefly discuss how this can be generalized to AdS_5 boundary correlators using ambitwistors.
Francis works in algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. His research ranges from pure mathematics to methods for precision calculations in high-energy particle physics. He is also committed to supporting the mathematical sciences through fundraising and charitable work. He is a Senior Research Fello at All Souls College.
It's the Week 5 Student Bulletin!