Wed, 26 Jun 2024
17:00
Lecture Theatre 1

From Ronald Ross to ChatGPT: the birth and strange life of the random walk - Jordan Ellenberg

Jordan Ellenberg
(University of Wisconsin - Madison)
Further Information

Between 1905 and 1910 the idea of the random walk, now a major topic in applied maths, was invented simultaneously and independently by multiple people in multiple countries for completely different purposes – in the UK, the story starts with Ronald Ross and the problem of mosquito control, but elsewhere, the theory was being developed in domains from physics to finance to winning a theological argument (really!).

Jordan will tell some part of this story and also gesture at ways that random walks (or Markov processes, named after the theological arguer) underlie current approaches to artificial intelligence; he will touch on some of his own work with DeepMind and speculate about the capabilities of those systems now and in the future.

Jordan Ellenberg is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of best-selling works of non-fiction and fiction, and has written and lectured extensively for a general audience about the wonders of mathematics for over fifteen years.

Please email external-relations@maths.ox.ac.uk to register to attend in person.

The lecture will be broadcast on the Oxford Mathematics YouTube Channel on Thursday 18 July at 5-6pm and any time after (no need to register for the online version).

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.Banner

Thu, 27 Oct 2022

12:00 - 13:00
L1

Swimming in complex fluids

Prof. Saverio Spagnolie
(University of Wisconsin - Madison)
Further Information
Saverio Spagnolie is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a courtesy appointment in chemical and biological engineering. His research focuses on problems in biological propulsion and soft matter, complex fluids, and numerical methods, and he is the director of the AMEP Lab (Applied Math, Engineering and Physics Lab). Prior to his post in Madison, Saverio received a Ph.D. in mathematics at the Courant Institute then held postdoctoral positions in engineering at UCSD and at Brown.
Abstract

Many microorganisms must navigate strange biological environments whose physics are unique and counter-intuitive, with wide-ranging consequences for evolutionary biology and human health. Mucus, for instance, behaves like both a fluid and an elastic solid. This can affect locomotion dramatically, which can be highly beneficial (e.g. for mammalian spermatozoa swimming through cervical fluid) or extremely problematic (e.g. the Lyme disease spirochete B. burgdorferi swimming through the extracellular matrix of human skin). Mathematical modeling and numerical simulations continue to provide new fundamental insights about the biological world in and around us and point toward new possibilities in biomedical engineering. These complex fluid phenomena can either enhance or retard a microorganism's swimming speed, and can even change the direction of swimming, depending on the body geometry and the properties of the fluid. We will discuss analytical and numerical insights into swimming through model viscoelastic (Oldroyd-B) and liquid-crystalline (Ericksen-Leslie) fluids, with a special focus on the important and in some cases dominant roles played by the presence of nearby boundaries.

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