Lincoln Wallen is the Former CTO, Dreamworks Animation. All are welcome
Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us. Are they really an improvement on the humans they are replacing?
Hannah Fry is a lecturer in the Mathematics of Cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL. She is also a well-respected broadcaster and the author of several books including the recently published 'Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine.'
5.00pm-6.00pm, Mathematical Institute, Oxford
Please email @email to register
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The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets
Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures
Can Mathematics Understand the Brain?' - Alain Goriely
The human brain is the object of the ultimate intellectual egocentrism. It is also a source of endless scientific problems and an organ of such complexity that it is not clear that a mathematical approach is even possible, despite many attempts.
In this talk Alain will use the brain to showcase how applied mathematics thrives on such challenges. Through mathematical modelling, we will see how we can gain insight into how the brain acquires its convoluted shape and what happens during trauma. We will also consider the dramatic but fascinating progression of neuro-degenerative diseases, and, eventually, hope to learn a bit about who we are before it is too late.
Alain Goriely is Professor of Mathematical Modelling, University of Oxford and author of 'Applied Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction.'
March 8th, 5.15 pm-6.15pm, Mathematical Institute, Oxford
Please email @email to register
The so-called moonshine phenomenon relates modular forms and finite group representations. After the celebrated monstrous moonshine, various new examples of moonshine connection have been discovered in recent years. The study of these new moonshine examples has revealed interesting connections to K3 surfaces, arithmetic geometry, and string theory. In this colloquium I will give an overview of these recent developments.
Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols argues that in this climate, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy- or in the worst case, a combination of both.
Tom Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School, and a former aide in the U.S. Senate. His latest book is The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. This lecture is based on that book.
All welcome. No need to book.
A longstanding open question asks whether every unstable NIP theory interprets an infinite linear order. I will present a construction that almost provides a positive answer. I will also discuss some conjectural applications to the classification of omega-categorical NIP structure, generalizing what is known for omega-stable, and classification of models mimicking the superstable case.
For a nonlinear elliptic system coming from a nonlinear Schroedinger system, the interaction between components is represented by a symmetric matrix. The construction of possibly lower energy nontrivial solutions and the complete description of dependence of the solutions on the matrix are quite challenging tasks. Especially, we are interested in the case that intra-species interaction forces are fixed and inter-species forces are very large, that is, the diagonal part of the symmetric matric is fixed and the non-diagonal entries are very large. In this case, depending on the network between components by repulsive or attractive forces, several different types of patterns may appear. I would like to explain our recent studies on the problem with three components and touch a possible exploration on the general n-components problem.
Speaker: Radu Cimpeanu
Title: Crash testing mathematical models in fluid dynamics
Abstract: In the past decades, the broad area of multi-fluid flows (systems in which at least two fluids, be they liquids or mixtures of liquid and gas, co-exist) has benefited from simultaneous innovations in experimental equipment, concentrated efforts on analytical approaches, as well as the rise of high performance computing tools. This provides a wonderful wealth of techniques to approach a given challenge, however it also introduces questions as to which path(s) to take. In this talk I will explore the symbiotic relationship between reduced order modelling and fully nonlinear direct computations, each of their strengths and weaknesses and ultimately how to use a hybrid strategy in order to gain an understanding over larger subsets of often vast solution spaces. The discussion will take us through a number of interesting topics in fluid mechanics on a wide range of scales, from electrohydrodynamic control in microfluidics, to nonlinear waves in channel flows and violent drop impact scenarios.
Speaker: Liana Yepremyan
Title: Turan-type problems for hypergraphs
Abstract: One of the earliest results in extremal graph theory is Mantel's Theorem from 1907, which says that for given number of vertices, the largest triangle-free graph on these vertices is the complete bipartite graph with (almost) equal sizes. Turan's Theorem from 1941 generalizes this result to all complete graphs. In general, the Tur'\an number of a graph G (or more generally, of a hypergraph) is the largest number of edges in a graph (hypergraph) on given number of vertices containing no copy of G as a subgraph. For graphs a lot is known about these numbers, a result by Erd\Hos, Stone and Simonovits determines the correct order of magnitude of Tur\'an numbers for all non-bipartite graphs. However, these numbers are known only for few hypergraphs. We don't even know what is the Tur\'an number of the complete 3-uniform hypergraph on 4 vertices. In this talk I will give some introduction to these problems and brielfly describe some of the methods used, such as the stability method and the Lagrangian function, which are interesting on their own.
Who are you? What motivates you? What's important to you? How do you react to challenges and adversities? In this session we will explore the power of self-awareness (understanding our own characters, values and motivations) and introduce assertiveness skills in the context of building positive and productive relationships with colleagues, collaborators, students and others.