The National Physical Laboratory is the national measurement institute. Researchers in the Data Science Division analyse various types of data using mathematical, statistical and machine learning based methods. The goal of the workshop is to describe a set of exciting mathematical problems that are of interest to NPL and more generally to the Data Science community. In particular, I will describe the problem of clustering using minimum spanning trees (MST-Clustering), Non-Negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF), adaptive Compressed Sensing (CS) for tomography, and sparse polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) for parametrised PDE’s.

The talk will focus on five items:

Theorem 1. It is ZFC-independent whether every locally compact, $\omega_1$-compact space of cardinality $\aleph_1$  is the union of countably many countably compact spaces.

Problem 1. Is it consistent that every locally compact, $\omega_1$-compact space of cardinality $\aleph_2$  is the union of countably many countably compact spaces?

[`$\omega_1$-compact' means that every closed discrete subspace is countable. This is obviously implied by being the union of countably many countably compact spaces, but the converse is not true.]

Problem 2. Is ZFC enough to imply that there is  a normal, locally countable, countably compact space of cardinality greater than $\aleph_1$?

Problem 3. Is it consistent that there exists a normal, locally countable, countably compact space of cardinality greater than $\aleph_2$?

The spaces involved in Problem 2 and Problem 3 are automatically locally compact, because by "space" I mean "Hausdorff space" and so regularity is already enough to give every point a countable countably compact (hence compact) neighborhood.

Theorem 2. The axiom $\square_{\aleph_1}$ implies that there is a normal, locally countable, countably compact space of cardinality $\aleph_2$.

This may be the first application of $\square_{\aleph_1}$ to construct a topological space whose existence in ZFC is unknown.

In the cosmological scheme of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), the equations governing the crossover form each aeon to the next demand the creation of a dominant new scalar material that is postulated to be dark matter. In order that this material does not build up from aeon to aeon, it is taken to decay away completely over the history of the aeon. The dark matter particles (erebons) would be expected to behave as essentially classical particles of around a Planck mass, interacting only gravitationally, and their decay would be mainly responsible for the (~scale invariant)

temperature fluctuations in the CMB of the succeeding aeon. In our own aeon, erebon decay ought to be detectable as impulsive events observable by gravitational wave detectors.