Past

Proteomics is seen as the next logical step after genomics to understand life processes at the molecular level. With increasing capabilities of modern mass spectrometers the deep proteome (>8000 proteins detected) has become widely accessible, only to be replaced recently by the "Ultra-deep proteome" with ~14000 proteins detected in a single cell line. Furthermore, new data search algorithms and sample preparation methods allow not only to achieve comprehensive sequence coverage for the majority of proteins, but also to detect protein variations and single amino acid polymorphisms in proteins, further linking genomic variation to protein phenotypes. The combination of genomic and proteomic information on individual (patient) level could mark the beginning of the "Post-Proteomic Era".

Please register via https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/qbiox-colloquium-trinity-term-2017-ticke…

The ability to study the transcriptome, proteome – and other aspects – of many individual cells represents one of the most important technical breakthroughs and tools in biology and medical science of the past few years. They are revolutionising study of biological systems and human disease, enabling for example: hypothesis-free identification of rare pathogenic (or protective) cell subsets in chronic diseases, routine monitoring of patient immune phenotypes and direct discovery of mole cular targets in rare cell populations. In parallel, new computational and analytical approaches are being intensively developed to analyse the vast data sets generated by these technologies. However, there is still a huge gap between our ability to generate the data, analyse their technical soundness and actually interpret them. The QBIOX network may provide for a unique opportunity to complement recent investments in Oxford technical capabilities in single-cell technologies with the development of revolutionary, visionary ways of interpreting the data that would help Oxford researchers to compete as leaders in this field.

Please register via https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/qbiox-colloquium-trinity-term-2017-ticke…

We consider the differentiability of definable functions in tame expansions
of algebraically closed valued fields.
As the Frobenius inverse shows such a function may be nowhere
differentiable.
We prove differentiability almost everywhere in valued fields of
characteristic 0
that are C-minimal, definably complete and such that, in the valuation
group,
definable functions are strongly eventually linear.
This is joint work with Pablo Cubides-Kovacsics.

Manifolds with ordinary boundary/corners have found their presence in differential geometry and PDEs: they form Man^b or Man^c category; and for boundary value problems, they are nice objects to work on. Manifolds with analytical corners -- a-corners for short -- form a larger category Man^{ac} which contains Man^c, and they can in some sense be viewed as manifolds with boundary at infinity.
In this talk I'll walk you through the definition of manifolds with corners and a-corners, and give some examples to illustrate how the new definition will help.

Understanding the outcome of a collision between liquid drops (merge or bounce?) as well their impact and spreading over solid surfaces (splash or spread?) is key for a host of processes ranging from 3d printing to cloud formation. Accurate experimental observation of these phenomena is complex due to the small spatio-temporal scales or interest and, consequently, mathematical modelling and computational simulation become key tools with which to probe such flows.

Experiments show that the gas surrounding the drops can have a key role in the dynamics of impact and wetting, despite the small gas-to-liquid density and viscosity ratios. This is due to the formation of gas microfilms which exert their influence on drops through strong lubrication forces.  In this talk, I will describe how these microfilms cannot be described by the Navier-Stokes equations and instead require the development of a model based on the kinetic theory of gases.  Simulation results obtained using this model will then be discussed and compared to experimental data.

Dynatomic curves parametrize n-periodic orbits of a one-parameter family of polynomial dynamical systems. These curves lack the structure of their arithmetic-geometric analogues (modular curves of level n) but can be studied dynamically.  Morton and Silverman conjectured a dynamical analogue of the uniform boundedness conjecture (theorems of Mazur, Merel), asserting uniform bounds for the number of rational periodic points for such a family.  I will discuss recent work towards the function field version of their conjecture, including results on the reduction mod p of dynatomic curves for the quadratic polynomial family z^2+c.

For many applications in science and engineering, the ability to efficiently and accurately approximate solutions to elliptic PDEs dictates what physical phenomena can be simulated numerically.  In this seminar, we present a high-order accurate discretization technique for variable coefficient PDEs with smooth coefficients.  The technique comes with a nested dissection inspired direct solver that scales linearly or nearly linearly with respect to the number of unknowns.  Unlike the application of nested dissection methods to classic discretization techniques, the constant prefactors do not grow with the order of the discretization.  The discretization is robust even for problems with highly oscillatory solutions.  For example, a problem 100 wavelengths in size can be solved to 9 digits of accuracy with 3.7 million unknowns on a desktop computer.  The precomputation of the direct solver takes 6 minutes on a desktop computer.  Then applying the computed solver takes 3 seconds.  The recent application of the algorithm to inverse media scattering also will be presented.

I will  address the study of decay rates of solutions to dissipative equations. The characterization of these rates will first be given for a wide class of linear systems by the decay character, which is a number associated to the initial datum that describes the behavior of the datum near the origin in frequency space. The understanding of the behavior of the linear  combined with the decay character and the Fourier Splitting method is then used to obtain some  upper and lower bounds for decay of solutions to appropriate dissipative nonlinear equations, both in the incompressible and compressible case. 

I will talk about a result on meromorphic continuation of Euler products over primes p of definable p-adic or motivic integrals, and applications to zeta functions of groups. If time permitting, I'll state an analogue for counting rational points of bounded height in some adelic homogeneous spac

The goal of this talk will be to give an overview of recent work, joint with Kim Moore, on a short time existence problem in Lagrangian mean curvature flow. More specifically, we consider a compact initial Lagrangian submanifold with a finite number of singularities, each asymptotic to a pair of transversely intersecting planes. We show it is possible to construct a smooth Lagrangian mean curvature flow, existing for positive times, that attains the singular Lagrangian as its initial condition in a suitable weak sense.  The construction uses a family of smooth solutions whose initial conditions approximate the singular Lagrangian. In order to appeal to compactness theorems and produce the desired solution, it is necessary to first establish uniform curvature estimates on the approximating family. As time allows I hope to focus in particular on the proof of these estimates, and their role in the proof of the main theorem.

Each year Prof. Trefethen gives the Problem Solving Squad a sequence of problems with no hints, one a week, where the solution of each problem is a single real number to be computed by any method available.  We will present this year's three problems, involving (1) an S-shaped bifurcation curve, (2) shortest path around a random web, and (3) switching a time-varying system to maximize a matrix norm.

The 14 students this year are Simon Vary plus InFoMM cohort 2: Matteo Croci, Davin Lunz, Michael McPhail, Tori Pereira, Lindon Roberts, Caoimhe Rooney, Ian Roper, Thomas Roy, Tino Sulzer, Bogdan Toader, Florian Wechsung, Jess Williams, and Fabian Ying.  The presentations will be by (1) Lindon Roberts, (2) Florian Wechsung, and (3) Thomas Roy.

Delsarte-Goethals frames are a popular choice for deterministic measurement matrices in compressive sensing. I will show that it is possible to construct extremely sparse matrices which share precisely the same row space as Delsarte-Goethals frames. I will also describe the combinatorial block design underlying the construction and make a connection to Steiner equiangular tight frames.
 

Part of the series "What do historians of mathematics do?"

The talk will set out the key debate in England at the Restoration, the need for a new orientation in mathematics towards algebra and the new "analysis". It will focus on efforts by three central players in England's mathematical community, John Pell, John Collins, and the Oxford mathematician John Wallis to produce an English language algebra text which would play a pioneering role in promoting this change. What was the background to the work we now call Pell's Algebra and why was it so significant?

We study a model for lipid-bilayer membrane vesicles exhibiting phase separation, incorporating a phase field together with membrane fluidity and bending elasticity. We prove the existence of a plethora of equilibria in the large, corresponding to symmetry-breaking solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations. We also numerically compute a special class of such solutions, namely those possessing icosahedral symmetry. We overcome several difficulties along the way. Due to inherent surface fluidity combined with finite curvature elasticity, neither the Eulerian (spatial) nor the Lagrangian (material) description of the model lends itself well to analysis. This is resolved via a singularity-free radial-map description, which effectively eliminates the grossly under-determined mid-plane deformation. We then use well known group-theoretic selection techniques combined with global bifurcation methods to obtain our results.

We will discuss a construction of cobordism maps on the full link complex for decorated link cobordisms. We will focus on some formal properties, such as grading change formulas and local relations. We will see how several expressions for mapping class group actions can be interpreted in terms of pictorial relations on decorated surfaces. Similarly, we will see how these pictorial relations give a "connected sum formula" for the involutive concordance invariants of Hendricks and Manolescu.

Lyons’ theory of rough paths allows us to solve stochastic differential equations driven by a Gaussian processes X of finite p-variation. The rough integral of the solutions against X again exists. We show that the solution also belong to the domain of the divergence operator of the Malliavin derivative, so that the 'Skorohod integral' of the solution with respect to X can also be defined. The latter operation has some properties in common with the Ito integral, and a natural question is to find a closed-form conversion formula between this rough integral and its Malliavin divergence. This is particularly useful in applications, where often one wants to compute the (conditional) expectation of the rough integral. In the case of Brownian motion our formula reduces to the classical Stratonovich-to-Ito conversion formula. There is an interesting difference between the formulae obtained in the cases 2<=p<3 and 3<=p<4, and we consider the reasons for this difference. We elaborate on the connection with previous work in which the integrand is generally assumed to be the gradient of a smooth function of X_{t}; we show that our formula can recover these results as special cases. This is joint work with Nengli Lim.

Let Q be a uniformly random quadrangulation with simple boundary decorated by a critical (p=3/4) face percolation configuration.  We prove that the chordal percolation exploration path on Q between two marked boundary edges converges in the scaling limit to SLE(6) on the Brownian disk (equivalently, a Liouville quantum gravity surface).  The topology of convergence is the Gromov-Hausdorff-Prokhorov-uniform topology, the natural analog of the Gromov-Hausdorff topology for curve-decorated metric measure spaces.  Our method of proof is robust and, up to certain technical steps, extends to any percolation model on a random planar map which can be explored via peeling.  Joint work with E. Gwynne.

I shall discuss Zauner's conjecture about the existence of n^2 mutually equidistant points in complex projective space CP^{n-1} with its standard Fubini-Study metric. This is the so-called SIC-POVM problem, and is related to properties of the moment mapping that embeds CP^{n-1} into the Lie algebra su(n). In the case n=3, there is an obvious 1-parameter family of such sets of 9 points under the action of SU(3) and we shall sketch a proof that there are no others. This is joint work with Lane Hughston.

Understanding the structure of hadrons in terms of their fundamental constituents requires an understanding of QCD at large distances, a vastly complex and unsolved dynamical problem. I will discuss in this talk a new approach to hadron structure based on superconformal quantum mechanics in the light-front and its holographic embedding in a higher dimensional gravity theory. This approach captures essential aspects of the confinement dynamics which are not apparent from the QCD Lagrangian, such as the emergence of a mass scale and confinement, the occurrence of a zero mode: the pion, universal Regge trajectories for mesons and baryons and precise connections between the light meson and nucleon spectra. This effective semiclassical approach to relativistic bound-state equations in QCD can be extended to heavy-light hadrons where heavy quark masses break the conformal invariance but the underlying dynamical supersymmetry holds.
 

Professor Uta Frith FRS is a distinguished developmental psychologist who is well known for her pioneering research on autism spectrum disorders. She also has a long-standing interest in matters relating to diversity in science, and is the Chair of the Royal Society's Diversity Committee. Oxford Mathematician Dr Maria Bruna is a Junior Research Fellow in Mathematics at St John's College, and has won prizes such as the L'Oréal-UNESCO UK and Ireland For Women in Science Fellowship and the Olga Taussky Pauli Fellowship, Wolfgang Pauli Institute. This informal discussion will no doubt include a range of topics -- but it is hard to say in advance where the conversation might go!

In my research I model three components of the Earth system: the ice sheets, the ocean, and the solid Earth. In the first half of this talk I will describe the traditional approach that is used to model the impact of ice sheet growth and decay on global sea-level change and solid Earth deformation. I will then go on to explain how collaboration across the fields of glaciology, geodynamics and seismology is providing exciting new insight into feedbacks between ice dynamics and solid Earth deformation.

Biomedical research and clinical practice rely on complex and multimodality

datasets for the characterisation of human organs in health and disease. In

computational biomedicine, we often argue that multiscale computational

models are and will be increasingly required as tools for data integration,

for probing the established knowledge of physiological systems, and for

predictions of the effects of therapies and disease. But what has

computational biomedicine delivered so far? This presentation will describe

successes, failures and future directions of computational models in

cardiac research from basic to translational science.

I spent a number of years trading government bonds and interest-rate derivatives for Barclays Capital. This included the period of the financial crisis, and I was a colleague of some of the Barclays traders charged with fraud related to LIBOR rate manipulation. I will present a some examples of common trading scenarios, and some of the ethical issues these might raise for quants.
 

Let A be an abelian variety over the function field K of a curve over a finite field of characteristic p>0. We shall show that the group A(K^{p^{-\infty}}) is finitely generated, unless severe restrictions are put on the geometry of A. In particular, we shall show that if A is ordinary and has a point of bad reduction then A(K^{p^{-\infty}}) is finitely generated. This result can be used to give partial answers to questions of Scanlon, Ziegler, Esnault, Voloch and Poonen.

Conventional neutron reflection is a very powerful tool to characterise surfactants, polymers and other materials at the solid/liquid and air/liquid interfaces. Usually the analysis considers molecular layers with coherent addition of reflected waves that give the resultant reflected intensity. In this short workshop talk I will illustrate recent developments in this approach to address a wide variety of challenges of academic and commercial interest. Specifically I will introduce the challenges of using substrates that are thick on the coherence lengthscale of the radiation and the issues that brings in the structural analysis. I also invite the audience to consider if there may be some mathematical analysis that might lead us to exploit this incoherence to optimise our analysis. In particular, facilitating the removal of the 'background substrate contribution' to help us focus on the adsorbed layers of most interest.

I will review the notion of classifying topos of a first-order (geometric) theory and explain the central role enjoyed by theories of presheaf type (i.e. classified by a presheaf topos) in the context of the topos-theoretic investigation of the model theory of geometric theories. After presenting a few main results and characterizations for theories of presheaf type, I will illustrate the generality of the point of view provided by this class of theories by discussing a topos-theoretic framework unifying and generalizing Fraissé’s construction in model theory and topological Galois theory and leading to an approach to the problem of the independence from l of l-adic cohomology.

In 2016, Habegger and Pila published a proof of the Zilber-Pink conjecture for curves in abelian varieties (all defined over $\mathbb{Q}^{\rm alg}$). Their article also contained a proof of the same conjecture for a product of modular curves that was conditional on a strong arithmetic hypothesis. Both proofs were extensions of the Pila-Zannier strategy based in o-minimality that has yielded many results in this area. In this talk, we will explain our generalisation of the strategy to the Zilber-Pink conjecture for any Shimura variety. This is joint work with J. Ren.

Floer (co)homology, invariant which recovers periodic orbits of a Hamiltonian system, is the central topic of symplecic topology at present. Its analogue for open symplecic manifolds is called symplectic (co)homology. Our goal is to compute this invariant for big family of spaces called Nakajima's Quiver Varieties, spaces obtained as hyperkahler quotients of representation spaces of quivers.
 

Considerable attention has been recently focused on the study of muscle tissues viewed as prototypes of new materials that can actively generate stresses. The intriguing mechanical properties of such systems can be linked to hierarchical internal architecture. To complicate matters further, they are driven internally by endogenous mechanisms supplying energy and maintaining non-equilibrium.  In this talk we review the principal mechanisms of force generation in muscles and discuss the adequacy of the available mathematical models.

We  study  the  concept  of   financial  bubble  under model uncertainty.
We suppose the agent to be endowed with a family Q of local martingale measures for  the  underlying  discounted  asset  price. The priors are allowed to be mutually singular to each other.
One fundamental issue is the definition of a well-posed concept of robust fundamental value of a given  financial asset.
Since in this setting we have no linear pricing system, we choose to describe robust fundamental values through superreplication prices.
To this purpose, we investigate a dynamic version of robust superreplication, which we use
to  introduce  the  notions  of  bubble  and  robust  fundamental  value  in  a  consistent way with the existing literature in the classical case of one prior.

This talk is based on the works [1] and [2].

[1] Biagini, F. , Föllmer, H. and Nedelcu, S. Shifting martingale measures
and the slow birth of a bubble as a submartingale, Finance and
Stochastics: Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 297-326, 2014.

[2] Biagini, F., Mancin, J.,
Financial Asset Price Bubbles under Model 
Uncertainty, Preprint, 2016.

Structural optimization can be interpreted as the attempt to find the best mechanical structure to support specific load cases respecting some possible constraints. Within this context, topology optimization aims to obtain the connectivity, shape and location of voids inside a prescribed structural design domain. The methods for the design of stiff lightweight structures are well established and can already be used in a specific range of industries where such structures are important, e.g., in aerospace and automobile industries.

In this seminar, we will go through the basic engineering concepts used to quantify and analyze the computational models of mechanical structures. After presenting the motivation, the methods and mathematical tools used in structural topology optimization will be discussed. In our method, an implicit level set function is used to describe the structural boundaries. The optimization problem is approximated by linearization of the objective and constraint equations via Taylor’s expansion. Shape sensitivities are used to evaluate the change in the structural performance due to a shape movement and to feed the mathematical optimiser in an iterative procedure. Recent developments comprising multiscale and Multiphysics problems will be presented and a specific application proposal including acoustic-structure interaction will be discussed.

We determine the hydrodynamic limit of some kinetic equations with either stochastic Vlasov force term or stochastic collision kernel. We obtain stochastic second-order parabolic equations at the limit. In the regime we consider, we also observe (or do not observe) some phenomena of enhanced diffusion. Joint works with Nils Caillerie, Arnaud Debussche, Martina Hofmanová.
 

We discuss a recent preprint by Aschenbrenner, Khélif, Naziazeno and
Scanlon, giving a positive solution to the ring-analogue of Pop's
problem on elementary equivalence vs isomorphism. 

For every $\epsilon>0$ does there exist some $n\in\mathbb{N}$ and a bijection $f:\mathbb{Z}_n\to\mathbb{Z}_n$ such that $f(x+1)=2f(x)$ for at least $(1-\epsilon)n$ elements of $\mathbb{Z}_n$ and $f(f(f(f(x))))=(x)$ for all $x\in\mathbb{Z}_n$? I will discuss this question and its relation to an important open problem in the theory of countable discrete groups.

Coisotropic submanifolds arise naturally in symplectic geometry as level sets of moment maps and in algebraic geometry in the context of normal crossing divisors. In examples, the Marsden-Weinstein quotient or (Fano) complete intersections are often uniruled. 
We show that under natural geometric assumptions on a coisotropic submanifold, the symplectic quotient of the coisotropic is always geometrically uniruled. 
I will explain how to assign a Lagrangian and a hypersurface to a fibered, stable coisotropic C. The Lagrangian inherits a fibre bundle structure from C, the hypersurface captures the generalised Reeb dynamics on C. To derive the result, we then adapt and apply techniques from Lagrangian Floer theory and symplectic field theory.
This is joint work with Jonny Evans.
 

Many extremal results on cycles use what may be called BFS method, where a breath first search tree is used as a skeleton to build desired structures. A well-known example is the Bondy-Simonovits theorem that every n-vertex graph with more than 100kn^{1+1/k} edges contains an even cycle of length 2k. The standard BFS method, however, is not easily applicable for supersaturation problems where one wishes to show the existence of many copies of a given  subgraph. The method is also not easily applicable in the hypergraph setting.

In this talk, we focus on some variants of the standard BFS method. We use one of these in conjunction with some useful general reduction theorems that we develop to establish the supersaturation of loose (linear) even cycles in linear hypergraphs. This extends Simonovits' supersaturation theorem on even cycles in graphs. This is joint work with Liana Yepremyan.

If time allows, we will also discuss another variant (joint with Jie Ma) used in the study of Berge cycles of consecutive lengths in hypergraphs.

Heckman introduced N operators on the space of polynomials in N variables, such that these operators form a covariant set relative to permutations of the operators and variables, and such that Jack symmetric polynomials are eigenfunctions of the power sums of these operators. We introduce the analogues of these N operators for Macdonald symmetric polynomials, by using Cherednik operators. The latter operators pairwise commute, and Macdonald polynomials are eigenfunctions of their power sums. We compute the limits of our operators at N → ∞ . These limits yield a Lax operator for Macdonald symmetric functions. This is a joint work with Evgeny Sklyanin.

What's the continuous analog of randn?  In recent months I've been exploring such questions with Abdul-Lateef Haji-Ali and other members of the Chebfun team, and Chebfun now has commands randnfun, randnfun2, randnfunsphere, and randnfundisk.  These are based on finite Fourier series with random coefficients, and interesting questions arise in the "white noise" limit as the lengths of the series approaches infinity and as random ODEs become stochastic DEs.    This work is at an early stage and we are grateful for input from stochastic experts at Oxford and elsewhere.

Multi-agent systems in nature oftentimes exhibit emergent behaviour, i.e. the formation of patterns in the absence of a leader or external stimuli such as light or food sources. We present a non-local two species crossinteraction model with cross-diffusion and explore its long-time behaviour. We observe a rich zoology of behaviours exhibiting phenomena such as mixing and/or segregation of both species and the formation of travelling pulses.

 Locality is not expected to be a fundamental aspect of a full theory of quantum gravity; it should be emergent in an appropriate semiclassical limit.  In the context of general holography, I'll define a new construct - the causal state - which provides a necessary and sufficient condition for a boundary state to have a holographic semiclassical dual causal geometry (and thus be "local").  This definition illuminates some general features of holographic quantum gravity: for instance, I'll show that the emergence of locality is "all or nothing" in the sense that it exhibits features of quantum error correction and quantum secret sharing.  In the special case of AdS/CFT, I'll also argue that the causal state is the natural boundary dual to the so-called causal wedge of a region. 

Part of the series "What do historians of mathematics do?"  
In the last year of 14th century, a French mathematician/geometer Jean Mignot, was called from Paris to help with the construction of the Cathedral of Milan. Thus was created one of the most famous stories about how mathematics literally supports great works of art, helping them stand the test of time. This talk will look at some patterns that begin to become apparent in the investigations of the relationship between architecture and mathematics and the creativity that is common to the pursuit of both. I will present the case on how this may matter to someone who is interested in the history of mathematics. To make this more intelligible, I will partly talk also of my personal journey in investigating this relationship and the issues I have researched and written about, and how these in turn changed my view of the nature of mathematics education.