Song of the Week: Yvonne Baker - You Didn't Say a Word

Known as the 'James Bond one' by aficionados, this is one of hundreds of obscure, small label soul tracks from sixties America that were adopted by the Northern Soul scene in the UK, many of them absolute bangers.

Yvonne's voice on the chorus...

Library news

Whitehead Library: new books in the Whitehead Library include those in the image. Full list here.

NEW E-Books: Springer Mathematics & Statistics E-Books, 2021-2024 

Café π news

Start your day right at Café Pi: buy any hot drink and enjoy a pastry for £1. 

This offer is available before 11am.

Thu, 05 Dec 2024

11:00 - 12:00
C1

Local-Global Principles and Fields Elementarily Characterised by Their Absolute Galois Groups

Benedikt Stock
(University of Oxford)
Abstract

Jochen Koenigsmann’s Habilitation introduced a classification of fields elementarily characterised by their absolute Galois groups, including two conjecturally empty families. The emptiness of one of these families would follow from a Galois cohomological conjecture concerning radically closed fields formulated by Koenigsmann. A promising approach to resolving this conjecture involves the use of local-global principles in Galois cohomology. This talk examines the conceptual foundations of this method, highlights its relevance to Koenigsmann’s classification, and evaluates existing local-global principles with regard to their applicability to this conjecture.

Thu, 21 Nov 2024

11:00 - 12:00
C3

Almost sure convergence to a constant for a mean-aggregated term language

Sam Adam-Day
(University of Oxford)
Abstract
With motivation coming from machine learning, we define a term language on graphs generalising many graph neural networks. Our main result is that the closed terms of this language converge almost surely to constants. This probabilistic result holds for Erdős–Rényi graphs for a variety of sparsity levels, as well as the Barabási–Albert preferential attachment graph distribution. The key technique is a kind of almost sure quantifier elimination. A natural extension of this language generalises first-order logic, and a similar convergence result can be obtained there.
 
Thu, 31 Oct 2024
17:00

The Koponen Conjecture

Scott Mutchnik
(IMJ-PRG)
Abstract
This is on joint work with John Baldwin and James Freitag.
One of the central projects of model theory, initiated by Shelah in his book "Classification Theory," is to classify unstable first-order theories. As part of this program, Koponen proposes to classify simple homogeneous structures, such as the random graph. More precisely, she conjectures (2016) that all simple theories with quantifier elimination in a finite relational language are supersimple of finite rank, and asks (2014) whether they are one-based. In this talk, we discuss our resolution of the Koponen conjecture, where we show that the answer to this question is yes. In the process, we further demonstrate what Kennedy (2020) calls ''the fragility of the syntax-semantics distinction.”

Returning Carers' Workshop - Wednesday 20 November

Childcare Services will host a Returning Carers' Workshop on Wednesday 20 November at 10.30am. This online event is available to staff across the University, with a particular focus on those returning to work following a period or periods of maternity leave, paternity leave, adoption leave or parental leave. The goal is to provide recent returners with the information, tools, support and networks they need to ensure a smooth and successful return to work.

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