Physics and the Science of Living Things – HAPP one day conference, in-person/livestreamed, 10:30-17:00, Saturday 24 February
This conference will review how physics has contributed to the science of living things from antiquity to the present day through a survey of the milestones in how this knowledge has been gained.
University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PW, 10:30-17:00, Saturday 24th February 2024.
Join us on Wednesday 24 January for a discussion on Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, a British statistician and geneticist, who pioneered the development of experimental design and the application of statistical methods in science. An influential figure in British scientific history, Fisher was also a leading eugenicist.
16:00
A new approach to modularity
Abstract
In the 1960's Langlands proposed a generalisation of Class Field Theory. I will review this and describe a new approach using the trace formua as well as some analytic arguments reminiscent of those used in the classical case. In more concrete terms the problem is to prove general modularity theorems, and I will explain the progress I have made on this problem.
16:00
Tangent spaces of Schubert varieties
Abstract
Schubert varieties in (twisted) affine Grassmannians and their singularities are of interest to arithmetic geometers because they model the étale local structure of the special fiber of Shimura varieties. In this talk, I will discuss a proof of a conjecture of Haines-Richarz classifying the smooth locus of Schubert varieties, generalizing a classical result of Evens-Mirkovic. The main input is to obtain a lower bound for the tangent space at a point of the Schubert variety which arises from considering certain smooth curves passing through it. In the second part of the talk, I will explain how in many cases, we can prove this bound is actually sharp, and discuss some applications to Shimura varieties. This is based on joint work with Pappas and Kisin-Pappas.