L1

In this talk we will construct a basis of quantum gravity states by cutting the Euclidean path integral. These states are made by inserting heavy dust shell operators on the asymptotic boundary. We will use this basis to resolve two puzzles : 

(1) The two boundary gravity Hilbert space seemingly does not factorise, which is in tension with holography. 

(2) Gibbons and Hawking proposed the gravity thermal partition function is computed by the euclidean path integral with a periodic time boundary condition. Why is does this perform a trace over gravity states?

To resolve these puzzles we will introduce some tricks that simply the evaluation of the gravity path integral in the saddle point approximation. 

This session is aimed at first-year undergraduates preparing for Prelims exams. A panel of lecturers will share key advice on exam technique and revision strategies, and a current student will offer practical tips from their own experience. This event complements the Friday@2 session in Week 1 on Dealing with Exam Anxiety.

This week’s Fridays@2 session is intended to provide advice on exam preparation and how to approach the Part A, B, and C exams.  A panel consisting of past examiners and current students will answer any questions you might have as you approach exam season.

This session, led by the Counselling Service,  will guide you through a CBT informed understanding of anxiety, which may arise about exams. The session includes:

• Psychoeducation - what is happening in the brain and body when we worry about exams
• Paradox of worry – how more pressure, makes studying less likely
• Experiential exercises – management strategies to maintain focus and engagement
• Takeaway tools – a collection of managing stress skills for self-guided practice
• Practical tips – enhance your exam preparation

Please join us for a fireside chat, hosted by OSE, between PQShield founder and visiting professor, Dr Ali El Kaafarani, and Sami Walter, associate at Oxford Sciences Enterprises (OSE). 

Dr Ali El Kaafarani is the founder and CEO of PQShield, a post-quantum cryptography (PQC) company empowering organisations, industries and nations with quantum-resistant cryptography that is modernising the vital security systems and components of the world's technology supply chain.  

In this chat, we’ll discuss Dr Ali El Kaafarani’s experience founding PQShield and lessons learned from spinning a company out from the Oxford ecosystem.

I will describe a new method for constructing conformal blocks for the Virasoro vertex algebra with central charge c=1, by "nonabelianization", relating them to conformal blocks for the Heisenberg algebra on a branched double cover. The construction is joint work with Qianyu Hao. Special cases give rise to formulas for tau-functions and solutions of integrable systems of PDE, such as Painleve I and its higher analogues. The talk will be reasonably self-contained (in particular I will explain what a conformal block is).

We will review physics-informed neural networks (NNs) and summarize available extensions for applications in computational science and engineering. We will also introduce new NNs that learn functionals and nonlinear operators from functions and corresponding responses for system identification. 

These two key developments have formed the backbone of scientific machine learning that has disrupted the path of computational science and engineering and has created new opportunities for all scientific domains. We will discuss some of these opportunities in digital twins, autonomy, materials discovery, etc.

Moreover, we will discuss bio-inspired solutions, e.g., spiking neural networks and neuromorphic computing.

Many justifications can be offered for the study of the history of mathematics. Here we focus on three, each of them illustrated by a specific historical example: it can aid in the learning of mathematics; it can prompt the development of new mathematics; and last but certainly not least – it's fun and interesting!