Past

“Narrative and Proof”, is an interdisciplinary discussion where one of the UK's leading scientists, Marcus du Sautoy, will argue that mathematical proofs are not just number-based, but also rely on narrative. He will be joined by author Ben Okri, mathematician Roger Penrose, and literature expert Laura Marcus, to consider how narrative shapes the sciences as well as the arts.

The discussion will be chaired by Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford, and will be followed by audience questions and a drinks reception.

The event will take place from 5 to 6:30 pm on Tuesday 20 January 2015 at the Mathematical Institute, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford. The event is free and open to all, but registration is recommended. 

Please click here to register.

This event is co-hosted by the Mathematical Institute and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and celebrates the launch of TORCH’s Annual Headline Series 2014-15, Humanities and Science.
 

There is a well established body of research on quadratic optimization problems based on reformulations of the original problem as a conic program over the cone of completely positive matrices, or its conic dual, the cone of copositive matrices. As a result of this reformulation approach, novel solution schemes for quadratic polynomial optimization problems have been designed by drawing on conic programming tools, and the extensively studied cones of completely positive and of copositive matrices. In particular, this approach has been applied to address key combinatorial optimization problems. Along this line of research, we consider quadratically constrained quadratic programs and provide sufficient and necessary conditions for
this type of problems to be reformulated as a conic program over the cone of completely positive matrices. Thus, recent related results for quadratic problems can be further strengthened. Moreover, these results can be generalized to optimization problems involving higher order polynomias.

A key question to develop our understanding of turbulence in shear flows is: what is the smallest perturbation to the laminar flow that causes a transition to turbulence, and how does this change with the Reynolds number, R?  Finding this so-called ``minimal seed'' is as yet unachievable in direct numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations. We search for the minimal seed in a low-dimensional model analogue to the full Navier-Stokes in plane sinusoidal flow, developed by Waleffe (1997). A previous such calculation found the minimal seed as the least distance (energy norm) from the origin (laminar flow) to the basin of attraction of another fixed point (turbulent attractor).  However, using a non-linear optimization technique, we found an internal boundary of the basin of attraction of the origin that separates flows which directly relaminarize from flows which undergo transient turbulence. It is this boundary which contains the minimal seed, and we find it to be smaller than the previously calculated minimal seed. We present results over a range of Reynolds numbers up to 2000 and find an R^{-1} scaling law fits reasonably well. We propose a new scaling law which asymptotes to R^{-1} for large R but, using some additional information, matches the minimal seed scaling better at low R.

Axions are ubiquitous in string theory compactifications. They are
pseudo goldstone bosons and can be extremely light, contributing to
the dark sector energy density in the present-day universe. The
mass defines a characteristic length scale. For 1e-33 eV<m< 1e-20
eV this length scale is cosmological and axions display novel
effects in observables. The magnitude of these effects is set by
the axion relic density. The axion relic density and initial
perturbations are established in the early universe before, during,
or after inflation (or indeed independently from it). Constraints
on these phenomena can probe physics at or beyond the GUT scale. I
will present multiple probes as constraints of axions: the Planck
temperature power spectrum, the WiggleZ galaxy redshift survey,
Hubble ultra deep field, the epoch of reionisation as measured by
cmb polarisation, cmb b-modes and primordial gravitational waves,
and the density profiles of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Together

these probe the entire 13 orders of magnitude in axion mass where
axions are distinct from CDM in cosmology, and make non-trivial
statements about inflation and axions in the string landscape. The
observations hint that axions in the range 1e-22 eV<m<1e-20 eV may
play an interesting role in structure formation, and evidence for
this could be found in the future surveys AdvACT (2015), JWST, and
Euclid (>2020). If inflationary B-modes are observed, a wide range
of axion models including the anthropic window QCD axion are
excluded unless the theory of inflation is modified. I will also
comment briefly on direct detection of QCD axions.

In this talk I will describe Arthur's classification of automorphic representations of symplectic and orthogonal groups using automorphic representations of $\mathrm{GL}_N$.

It is well known that there are topological obstructions to a manifold $M$ admitting a Riemannian metric of everywhere positive scalar curvature (psc): if $M$ is Spin and admits a psc metric, the Lichnerowicz–Weitzenböck formula implies that the Dirac operator of $M$ is invertible, so the vanishing of the $\hat{A}$ genus is a necessary topological condition for such a manifold to admit a psc metric. If $M$ is simply-connected as well as Spin, then deep work of Gromov--Lawson, Schoen--Yau, and Stolz implies that the vanishing of (a small refinement of) the $\hat{A}$ genus is a sufficient condition for admitting a psc metric. For non-simply-connected manifolds, sufficient conditions for a manifold to admit a psc metric are not yet understood, and are a topic of much current research.

I will discuss a related but somewhat different problem: if $M$ does admit a psc metric, what is the topology of the space $\mathcal{R}^+(M)$ of all psc metrics on it? Recent work of V. Chernysh and M. Walsh shows that this problem is unchanged when modifying $M$ by certain surgeries, and I will explain how this can be used along with work of Galatius and myself to show that the algebraic topology of $\mathcal{R}^+(M)$ for $M$  of dimension at least 6 is "as complicated as can possibly be detected by index-theory". This is joint work with Boris Botvinnik and Johannes Ebert.

Motivated by stochastic models for order books in stock exchanges we consider stochastic partial differential equations with a free boundary condition. Such equations can be considered generalizations of the classic (deterministic) Stefan problem of heat condition in a two-phase medium. 

Extending results by Kim, Zheng & Sowers we allow for non-linear boundary interaction, general Robin-type boundary conditions and fairly general drift and diffusion coefficients. Existence of maximal local and global solutions is established by transforming the equation to a fixed-boundary problem and solving a stochastic evolution equation in suitable interpolation spaces. Based on joint work with Marvin Mueller.

'We study an optimal switching problem with a state constraint: the controller is only allowed to choose strategies that keep the controlled diffusion in a closed domain. We prove that the value function associated to the weak formulation of this problem is the limit of the value function associated to an unconstrained switching problem with penalized coefficients, as the penalization parameter goes to infinity. This convergence allows to set a dynamic programming principle for the constrained switching problem. We then prove that the value function is a constrained viscosity solution to a system of variational inequalities (SVI for short). We finally prove that the value function is the maximal solution to this SVI. All our results are obtained without any regularity assumption on the constraint domain.’

The 2015 Oxford Brain Mechanics Workshop 19 and 20 January, 2015 in St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Everybody is welcome to attend but (free) registration is required.

The event will include speakers from both CMU and Oxford working on Brain Mechanics and Trauma, as well as some chosen international members from the IBMTL* (www.brainmech.ox.ac.uk).

As well as focusing on various aspects of brain mechanics research, the 2015 Oxford Brain Mechanics Workshop will include the UK launch of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) – University of Oxford ‘Brain Alliance’. We are delighted that Dr Subra Suresh, President of CMU will launch the workshop, introduced by Oxford Vice-Chancellor Prof. Andrew Hamilton.

The aim of the workshop is to foster new collaborative partnerships and facilitate the dissemination of ideas from researchers in different fields related to the study of brain mechanics, including pathology, injury and healing. The IBMTL is delighted to be a global partner in CMU’s ‘BrainHub’ initiative and further extend the truly interdisciplinary, collaborative network of IBMTL and its associated researchers in Medical Sciences, Neuroscience, Biology, Engineering, Physics and Mathematics.

• Speakers:
• Professor Andrew Hamilton, University of Oxford, UK
• Dr Subra Suresh, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Mr Nick de Pennington, University of Oxford, UK
• Professor Michel Destrade, National University of Ireland, Galway
• Dr Kristian Franze, University of Cambridge, UK
• Professor Alain Goriely, University of Oxford, UK
• Professor Gerhard Holzapfel, Graz University of Technology, Austria
• Professor Jimmy Hsia, University of Illinois
• Mr Jayaratnam Jayamohan, University of Oxford, UK
• Professor Antoine Jerusalem, University of Oxford, UK
• Professor Ellen Kuhl, Stanford University, USA
• Professor Philip R LeDuc, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Professor Riyi Shi, Purdue University, USA

The workshop is generously supported by the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics (OCCAM), which is led by IBMTL Co-Director, Prof Alain Goriely.

Those mentioned in the title are integral functionals of the Calculus of Variations

characterized by the fact of having an integrand switching between two different

kinds of degeneracies, dictated by a modulating coefficient. They have introduced

by Zhikov in the context of Homogenization and to give new examples of the related

Lavrentiev phenomenon. In this talk I will present some recent results aimed at

drawing a complete regularity theory for minima.

On calm clear nights a minimum in air temperature can occur just above the ground at heights of order 0.5m or less. This is contrary to the conventional belief that ground is the point of minimum. This feature is paradoxical as an apparent unstable layer (the height below the point of minimum) sustains itself for several hours. This was first reported from India by Ramdas and his coworkers in 1932 and was disbelieved initially and attributed to flawed thermometers. We trace its history, acceptance and present a mathematical model in the form of a PDE that simulates this phenomenon.

Most sensing systems exhibit so-called ‘sidelobe’ responses, which can be interpreted as an inevitable effect in one domain of truncation of the signal in the Fourier-complement domain.  Perhaps the best-known example is in antenna theory where sidelobes are an inevitable consequence of the fact that the antenna aperture must be finite.  The effect also appears in many other places, for example in time-frequency conversions and in the range domain of a pulse-compressed radar which radiates a signal only over a finite frequency band.  In the range domain these sidelobes extend over twice the length of the transmitted pulse.  For a conventional radar with relatively short pulses the effect of these unwanted returns is thus confined to a relatively short part of the range swathe.

Some of the most modern radar techniques, however, use continuous, noise-like transmissions.  ‘Primary’ noise-modulated radars are in their infancy but so-called ‘Passive’ radars using broadcast transmissions as their power source receive similar signals.  The sidelobes of even a small target at very short range can be larger than the main return from a target at much greater range.  This limits the dynamic range of the radar.

Since, however, the sidelobe pattern is predictable if the illuminating signal is known sufficiently accurately, the expected sidelobes due to a large target can be estimated and removed to tidy up the image.  This approach was first described formally in:

Hoegbom, J. A., ‘Aperture Synthesis with a Non-Regular Distribution of Interferometer Baselines,’ Astrom. Astrophys. Suppl. 15, pp417-26, 1974.

And is generally known by the name of the ‘CLEAN’ algorithm.

The seminar will outline the problem, outline the basic form of the algorithm and ask questions about what is possible with non-iterative versions of the algorithms, how to process the data coherently and how to understand any stability issues associated with the algorithm.

We are pleased to announce that Andrew Wiles will present the inaugural Oxford Mathematics Christmas Public Lecture. Please register by emailing @email

Marine-ice formation occurs on a vast range of length scales: from millimetre scale frazil crystals, to consolidated sea ice a metre thick, to deposits of marine ice under ice shelves that are hundreds of kilometres long. Scaling analyses is therefore an attractive and powerful technique to understand and predict phenomena associated with marine-ice formation, for example frazil crystal growth and the convective desalination of consolidated sea ice. However, there are a number of potential pitfalls arising from the assumptions implicit in the scaling analyses. In this talk, I tease out the assumptions relevant to these examples and test them, allowing me to derive simple conceptual models that capture the important geophysical mechanisms affecting marine-ice formation. 

We are looking for a better understanding of how a lithium wall can improve energy confinement in a tokamak plasma. Improved energy confinement can make a big difference to the minimum size of tokamak that could produce a fusion power gain.

(please see 
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/CompBioPublicSeminars/ for details)

I will outline some recent work with Jonathan Kirby regarding the first stage in the construction of the pseudo j-function. In particular, I will go through the construction of the analogue of the canonical countable pseudo exponential field as the "Fraisse limit" of a category of "partial j-fields". Although I will be talking about the j-function throughout the talk, it is not necessary to know anything about the j-function to get something from the talk. In particular, even if you don't know what the j-function is, you will still hopefully have an understanding of how to construct the countable pseudo-exp by the end of the talk.
 

Since its genesis in 1915, General Relativity has proven to be one of the most successful physical theories ever invented. Providing a description of the large scale structure of the universe it continues to be in agreement with all experimental tests to high accuracy. By merging Classical Mechanics and Electrodynamics to a consistent geometrical theory of space-time it has become one of the two pillars of modern theoretical physics alongside Quantum Mechanics. This talk aims to give an introduction to the ideas and concepts of General Relativity. After briefly reviewing Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics and experiments in contradiction with it the framework and axioms of General Relativity will be introduced. This will be followed by a survey on major implications of the (new) geometrical description of gravity. Finally an outlook on physics beyond General Relativity will be provided. 

Rational points on Kummer varieties can be studied through the variation of Selmer groups of quadratic twists of the underlying abelian variety, using an idea of Swinnerton-Dyer. We consider the case when the Galois action on 2-torsion has a large image. Under a mild additional assumption we prove the Hasse principle assuming the finiteness of relevant Shafarevich-Tate groups. This approach is inspired by the work of Mazur and Rubin.

The folded structures of proteins display a remarkable variety of three-dimensional forms, and this structural diversity confers to proteins their equally remarkable functional diversity. The accelerating accumulation of experimental structures, and the declining numbers of novel folds among them suggests that a substantial fraction of the protein folds used in nature have already been observed. The physical forces stabilizing the folded structures of proteins are now understood in some detail, and much progress has been made on the classical problem of predicting the structure of a particular protein from its sequence. However, there is as yet no satisfactory theory describing the “morphology” of protein folds themselves. This talk will describe an approach to this problem based on the description of protein folds as geometric objects using the differential geometry of curves and surfaces. Applications of the theory toward modeling of diverse protein folds and assemblies which are refractory to high-resolution structure determination will be emphasized.

The usual variational formulations of the Helmholtz equation are sign-indefinite (i.e. not coercive). In this talk, I will argue that this indefiniteness is not an inherent feature of the Helmholtz equation itself, only of its standard formulations. I will do this by presenting new sign-definite formulations of several Helmholtz boundary value problems.

This is joint work with Andrea Moiola (Reading).
 

In this talk, I will describe how to use the partial hodograph-Legendre transformation to show the analyticity of the free boundary in the elliptic thin obstacle problem. In particular, I will discuss the invertibility of this transformation and show that the resulting fully nonlinear PDE has a subelliptic structure. This is based on a joint work with Herbert Koch and Arshak Petrosyan.

Deciding whether or not two elements of a group are conjugate might seem like a trivial problem. However, there exist finitely presented groups where this problem is undecidable: there is no algorithm to output yes or no for any two elements chosen. In this talk Houghton groups (a family of groups all having solvable conjugacy problem) will be introduced as will the idea of twisted conjugacy: a generalisation of the conjugacy problem where an automorphism is also given. This will be our main tool in answering whether finite extensions and finite index subgroups of any Houghton group have solvable conjugacy problem.

The Banach-Tarski paradox is a celebrated result showing that, using the axiom of choice, it is possible to deconstruct a ball into finitely many pieces that may be rearranged to build two copies of that ball. In this seminar we will sketch the proof of the paradox trying to emphasize the key ideas.
 

Groups which act on rooted trees, and branch groups in particular, have provided examples of groups with exotic properties for the last three decades. This and their links to other areas of mathematics such as dynamical systems has made them the object of intense research.
One of their more useful properties is that of having a "tree-like" subgroup structure, in several senses. 
I shall explain what this means in the talk and give some applications.

In recent years, some powerful tools for computing semi-orthogonal decompositions of derived categories of algebraic varieties have been developed: Kuznetsov's theory of homological projective duality and the closely related technique of VGIT for LG models. In this talk I will explain how the latter works and how it can be used to understand the derived categories of complete intersections in Sym^2(P^n). As a consequence, we obtain a new proof of result of Hosono and Takagi, which says that a certain pair of non-birational Calabi-Yau 3-folds are derived equivalent.

Given a subset E of R^n with empty interior, what is the maximum regularity exponent s for which there exist non-zero distributions in the Bessel potential Sobolev space H^s_p(R^n) that are supported entirely inside E? This question has arisen many times in my recent investigations into boundary integral equation formulations of linear wave scattering by fractal screens, and it is closely related to other fundamental questions concerning Sobolev spaces defined on ``rough'' (i.e. non-Lipschitz) domains. Roughly speaking, one expects that the ``fatter'' the set, the higher the maximum regularity that can be supported. For sets of zero Lebesgue measure one can show, using results on certain set capacities from classical potential theory, that the maximum regularity (if it exists) is negative, and is (almost) characterised by the fractal (Hausdorff) dimension of E. For sets with positive measure the maximum regularity (if it exists) is non-negative,but appears more difficult to characterise in terms of geometrical properties of E.  I will present some partial results in this direction, which have recently been obtained by studying the asymptotic behaviour of the Fourier transform of the characteristic functions of certain fat Cantor sets.

We treat the problem of geometric interpretation of the formalism
of algebraic quantum mechanics as a special case of the general problem of
extending classical 'algebra - geometry' dualities (such as the
Gel'fand-Naimark theorem) to non-commutative setting.  
I will report on some progress in establishing such dualities. In
particular, it leads to a theory of approximate representations of Weyl
algebras
in finite dimensional  "Hilbert spaces". Some calculations based on this
theory will be discussed.