Writing is a part of any career in science or mathematics. I will make some remarks about the role writing has played in my life and the role it might play in yours.
How can we explain the patterns of genetic variation in the world around us? The genetic composition of a population can be changed by natural selection, mutation, mating, and other genetic, ecological and evolutionary mechanisms. How do they interact with one another, and what was their relative importance in shaping the patterns we see today?
Whereas the pioneers of the field could only observe genetic variation indirectly, by looking at traits of individuals in a population, researchers today have direct access to DNA sequences. But making sense of this wealth of data presents a major scientific challenge and mathematical models play a decisive role. This lecture will distil our understanding into workable models and explore the remarkable power of simple mathematical caricatures in interrogating modern genetic data.
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Science is giving us unprecedented insight into the big questions that have challenged humanity. Where did we come from? What is the ultimate destiny of the universe? What are the building blocks of the physical world? What is consciousness?
‘What We Cannot Know’ asks us to rein in this unbridled enthusiasm for the power of science. Are there limits to what we can discover about our physical universe? Are some regions of the future beyond the predictive powers of science and mathematics? Are there ideas so complex that they are beyond the conception of our finite human brains? Can brains even investigate themselves or does the analysis enter an infinite loop from which it is impossible to rescue itself?
To coincide with the launch of his new book of the same title, Marcus du Sautoy will be answering (or not answering) those questions. He will also be signing copies of the book before and after the lecture.
To book please email @email
Would you like to come see some toys?
'Toys' here have a special sense: objects of daily life which you can find or make in minutes, yet which, if played with imaginatively reveal surprises that keep scientists puzzling for a while. We will see table-top demos of many such toys and visit some of the science that they open up. The common theme is singularity.
Tadashi Tokieda is the Director of Studies in Mathematics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and the Poincaré Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Stanford.
To book please email @email
To book please email @email
In quite an elementary, hands-on talk, I will discuss some Ax-Lindemann type results in the setting of modular functions. There are some very powerful results in this area due to Pila, but in nonclassical variants we have only quite weak results, for a rather silly reason to be discussed in the talk.
For full details please visit:
http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/files/2015/10/Ada-Lovelace-S…
The massless Maxwell-Klein-Gordon system describes the interaction between an electromagnetic field (Maxwell) and a charged massless scalar field (massless Klein-Gordon, or wave). In this talk, I will present a recent proof, joint with D. Tataru, of global well-posedness and scattering of this system for arbitrary finite energy data in the (4+1)-dimensional Minkowski space, in which the PDE is energy critical.