UNFORTUNATELY THIS HAS BEEN CANCELLED. A NEW DATE WILL BE SET SOON.
-----
In recognition of a lifetime's contribution across the mathematical sciences, we are initiating a series of annual Public Lectures in honour of Roger Penrose. The first lecture will be given by his long-time collaborator and friend Stephen Hawking on 18th January at 5pm GMT. The lecture is sold out, but we will be podcasting live.
Fibre-reinforced fluids: from plants to extracellular matrix and beyond
Approaches to quantization
Abstract
Quantization is the study of the interface between commutative and
noncommutative geometry. There are myriad approaches to it, mostly presented
as ad hoc recipes. I shall discuss the motivating ideas, and the relations
between some of the methods, especially the relation between 'deformation'
and 'geometric' quantization.
14:15
The rationality of blocks of quasi-simple finite groups
Abstract
The Morita Frobenius number of an algebra is the number of Morita equivalence classes of its Frobenius twists. Morita Frobenius numbers were introduced by Kessar in 2004 in the context of Donovan’s Conjecture in block theory. I will present the latest results of a project in which we aim to calculate the Morita Frobenius numbers of the blocks of quasi-simple finite groups. I will also discuss the importance of a recent result of Bonnafe-Dat-Rouquier for our methods, and explain the relationship between Morita Frobenius numbers and Donovan’s Conjecture.
Moduli spaces of instanton sheaves on projective space
Abstract
Instanton bundles were introduced by Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin and Manin in the late 1970s as the holomorphic counterparts, via twistor
theory, to anti-self-dual connections (a.k.a. instantons) on the sphere S^4. We will revise some recent results regarding some of the basic
geometrical features of their moduli spaces, and on its possible degenerations. We will describe the singular loci of instanton sheaves,
and how these lead to new irreducible components of the moduli space of stable sheaves on the projective space.
12:00
The spreading speed of solutions of the non-local Fisher KPP equation
Abstract
The non-local Fisher KPP equation is used to model non-local interaction and competition in a population. I will discuss recent work on solutions of this equation with a compactly supported initial condition, which strengthens results on the spreading speed obtained by Hamel and Ryzhik in 2013. The proofs are probabilistic, using a Feynman-Kac formula and some ideas from Bramson's 1983 work on the (local) Fisher KPP equation.