Members of the University of Oxford are invited to a 'fireside chat' with Jack Clark, Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit at Anthropic on the topic of AI pacing, co-hosted by the Oxford Strategic Studies Group and Oxford Internet Institute.
Monday 16th November, 2-3 pm in the Sohmen Concert Hall, Schwarzman Centre.
We invite applications for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Applied Mathematics to work with Professor Maria Bruna at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. This is a full-time, fixed-term position for 24 months, funded by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. The starting date of the position is flexible, between January 2027 and October 2027.
Topological quantum field theories are one of the few cases of QFT that can be treated mathematically. The goal of this talk will be to recall a mathematician's definition of TFT, and demonstrate how it recovers features of QFT that are familiar to physicists. I will then introduce the notion of extended TFT, and explain how dualizability properties can be used to classify TFTs.
Alison Etheridge has been awarded the Ulf Grenander Prize in Stochastic Theory and Modeling by The American Mathematical Society for pioneering contributions to measure-valued branching processes, population genetics, and the interplay between these fields, including innovative population genetics models for structured populations.
Oxford Mathematician Kaibo Hu, together with his co-author Ting Lin, has won the The Langtangen Prize for the paper Finite element form-valued forms: Construction.
The Langtangen Prize is awarded annually to an outstanding paper or papers on the foundations of numerical simulation technology published in a given calendar year.
We study 5d N=1 theories engineered by (p,q) five-brane webs and their 3d N=4 magnetic quivers, focusing on the N + SU(N)^(k-1) + N gauge theory. We establish an exact parameter dictionary mapping the 5d flavour masses and instanton couplings to the FI parameters of the strong-coupling magnetic quiver. We test this dictionary against mass deformations, weak-coupling limits, and moment map VEVs, implemented via the 5d superconformal index and the 3d squashed-sphere partition function. We analyze these deformations on the magnetic-quiver side using a new framework that exactly tracks Higgsing patterns, decoupled sectors, and infrared theories. This promotes magnetic quivers to quantitative tools for studying how the 5d superconformal index responds to physical deformations
We show that large 5d moment map VEVs render the superconformal index distributional, mirroring bad theories in lower dimensions. We also develop a brane-web interpretation of these results, identifying the Hanany–Witten moves associated with the cascade of VEVs and relating inequivalent frames to distinct tessellations of the generalized toric diagram. Furthermore, we demonstrate that magnetic quivers remain powerful predictive tools even when the theory enters the bad regime.
