To the untrained ear, like your Song of the Week editor's, this piece sounds as though it might have been written in 1582. In fact it was written in 1982. John Tavener was one of the leading composers of choral religious music in the 20th century. The Lamb, a setting to music of the William Blake poem of 1789, is featured in the soundtrack for Paolo Sorrentino's Oscar-winning film The Great Beauty.
You may also be interested to know that John Taverner (sic) was a sixteenth century writer of choral music.
Accuracy controlled schemes for the eigenvalue problem of the neutron transport equation
Abstract
The neutron transport equation is a linear Boltzmann-type PDE that models radiative transfer processes, and fission nuclear reactions. The computation of the largest eigenvalue of this Boltzmann operator is crucial in nuclear safety studies but it has classically been formulated only at a discretized level, so the predictive capabilities of such computations are fairly limited. In this talk, I will give an overview of the modeling for this equation, as well as recent analysis that leads to an infinite dimensional formulation of the eigenvalue problem. We leverage this point of view to build a numerical scheme that comes with a rigorous, a posteriori estimation of the error between the exact, infinite-dimensional solution, and the computed one.
Distances in colourings of the plane
Abstract
We prove that every finite colouring of the plane contains a monochromatic pair of points at an odd (integral) distance from each other. We will also discuss some further results with Rose McCarty and Michal Pilipczuk concerning prime and polynomial distances.