The study of isolated systems has been vastly successful in the context of vanishing cosmological constant, Λ=0. However, there is no physically useful notion of asymptotics for the universe we inhabit with Λ>0.  The full non-linear framework is still under development, but some interesting results at the linearized level have been obtained. I will focus on the conceptual subtleties that arise at the linearized level and discuss the quadrupole formula for gravitational radiation as well as some recent developments.  

The analysis and characterization of human mobility using population-level mobility models is important for numerous applications, ranging from the estimation of commuter flows to modeling trade flows. However, almost all of these applications have focused on large spatial scales, typically from intra-city level to inter-country level. In this paper, we investigate population-level human mobility models on a much smaller spatial scale by using them to estimate customer mobility flow between supermarket zones. We use anonymized mobility data of customers in supermarkets to calibrate our models and apply variants of the gravity and intervening-opportunities models to fit this mobility flow and estimate the flow on unseen data. We find that a doubly-constrained gravity model can successfully estimate 65-70% of the flow inside supermarkets. We then investigate how to reduce congestion in supermarkets by combining mobility models with queueing networks. We use a simulated-annealing algorithm to find store layouts with lower congestion than the original layout. Our research gives insight both into how customers move in supermarkets and into how retailers can arrange stores to reduce congestion. It also provides a case study of human mobility on small spatial scales.

Suppose that we want to minimise the L-infinity norm of the Laplacian of a function (or a similar quantity) under Dirichlet boundary conditions. This is a convex, but not strictly convex variational problem. Nevertheless, it turns out that it has a unique solution, which is characterised by a system of PDEs. The behaviour is thus quite different from the better-known first order problems going back to Aronsson. This is joint work with N. Katzourakis (Reading).
 

Abstract regular polytopes are finite quotients of Coxeter complexes
with string diagram, satisfying a natural intersection property, see
e.g. [MMS2002]. They arise in a number of geometric and group-theoretic
contexts. The first class of such objects, beyond the
well-understood examples coming from finite and affine Coxeter groups,
are locally toroidal cases, e.g.  extensions of quotients of the affine
F_4 complex [3,3,4,3].  In 1996 P.McMullen & E.Schulte constructed a
number of examples of locally toroidal abstract regular polytopes of
type [3,3,4,3,3], and conjectured completeness of their list. We
construct counterexamples to the conjecture using a Y-shaped
presentation for a subgroup of the Monster, and discuss various
related questions.
 

Non-abelian gauge theories underly particle physics, including collision processes at particle accelerators. Recently, quantum scattering probabilities in gauge theories have been shown to be closely related to their counterparts in gravity theories, by the so-called double copy. This suggests a deep relationship between two very different areas of physics, and may lead to new insights into quantum gravity, as well as novel computational methods. This talk will review the double copy for amplitudes, before discussing how it may be extended to describe exact classical solutions such as black holes. Finally, I will discuss hints that the double copy may extend beyond perturbation theory. 

We consider solutions to the two-dimensional incompressible Euler system with only integrable vorticity, thus with possibly locally infinite energy. With such regularity, we use the recently developed theory of Lagrangian flows associated to vector fields with gradient given by a singular integral in order to define Lagrangian solutions, for which the vorticity is transported by the flow. We prove strong stability of these solutions via strong convergence of the flow, under the only assumption of $L^1$ weak convergence of the initial vorticity. The existence of Lagrangian solutions to the Euler system follows for arbitrary $L^1$ vorticity. Relations with previously known notions of solutions are shown.