L1

Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures

MC Escher - Artist, Mathematician, Man 

Roger Penrose and Jon Chapman

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The symbiosis between mathematics and art is personified by the relationship between Roger Penrose and the great Dutch graphic artist MC Escher. In this lecture Roger will give a personal perspective on Escher's work and his own relationship with the artist while Jon Chapman will demonstrate the mathematical imagination inherent in the work. 

The lecture will be preceded by a showing of the BBC 4 documentary on Escher presented by Sir Roger Penrose. Private Escher prints and artefacts will be on display outside the lecture theatre.

5pm

Lecture Theatre 1

Mathematical Institute

Andrew Wiles Building

Radcliffe Observatory Quarter

Woodstock Road

OX2 6GG

Roger Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford

Jon Chapman is Statutory Professor of Mathematics and Its Applications at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford

The talk will consider three well-defined problems which can be interpreted as mathematical tests of the physical reality of black holes: Rigidity, stability and formation of black holes.

The question of deriving Fluid Mechanics equations from deterministic
systems of interacting particles obeying Newton's laws, in the limit
when the number of particles goes to infinity, is a longstanding open
problem suggested by Hilbert in his 6th problem. In this talk we shall
present a few attempts in this program, by explaining how to derive some
linear models such as the Heat, acoustic and Stokes-Fourier equations.
This corresponds to joint works with Thierry Bodineau and Laure Saint
Raymond.

I will describe a categorical approach to analytic geometry using the theory of quasi-abelian closed symmetric monoidal categories which works both for Archimedean and non-Archimdedean base fields. In particular I will show how the weak G-topologies of (dagger) affinoid subdomains can be characterized by homological method. I will end by briefly saying how to generalize these results for characterizing open embeddings of Stein spaces. This project is a collaboration with Oren Ben-Bassat and Kobi Kremnizer.

We will discuss our approach to global analytic geometry, based on overconvergent power series and functors of functions. We will explain how slight modifications of it allow us to develop a derived version of global analytic geometry. We will finish by discussing applications to the cohomological study of arithmetic varieties.

I will talk in down to earth terms about several main features of this theory.

We describe how p-adic height pairings allow us to find integral points on hyperelliptic curves, in the spirit of Kim's nonabelian Chabauty program. In particular, we discuss how to carry out this ``quadratic Chabauty'' method over quadratic number fields (joint work with Amnon Besser and Steffen Mueller) and present related ideas to find rational points on bielliptic genus 2 curves (joint work with Netan Dogra).

One of the big ideas in linear algebra is {\em eigenvalues}. Most matrices become in some basis {\em diagonal} matrices; so a lot of information about the matrix (which is specified by $n^2$ matrix entries) is encoded by by just $n$ eigenvalues. The fact that lots of different matrices can have the same eigenvalues reflects the fact that matrix multiplication is not commutative.

I'll look at how to make these vague statements (``lots of different matrices...") more precise; how to extend them from matrices to abstract symmetry groups; and how to relate abstract symmetry groups to matrices.