The final Hilary Term Fridays@2 is in L1 today: Teaching Mathematics as a Career (https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/70565)
Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, was idiosyncratic to say the least, blending a range of often experiemental musical styles over 13 albums before giving it all up and devoting himself to abstract expressionist painting (see earlier item) which, to be fair, made him far more money.
Beefheart can be very inaccessible, at least on the first 45 hearings. But fear not, this is him at his most accessible.
16:00
Geometry and incompleteness of G_2-moduli spaces
Abstract
Riemannian manifolds with holonomy G_2 form an exceptional class of Ricci-flat manifolds occurring only in dimension 7. In the compact setting, their moduli spaces are known to be smooth (unobstructed), finite-dimensional, and to carry a natural Riemannian structure induced by the L^2-metric; but besides this very little is known about the global properties of G_2-moduli spaces. In this talk, I will review the basics of G_2-geometry and present new results concerning the distance theory and the geometry of the moduli spaces.