L2

The stability of structures continues to be scientifically fascinating and technically important.  Shell buckling emerged as one of the most challenging nonlinear problems in mechanics more than fifty years ago when it was intensively studied.  It has returned to life with new challenges motivated not only by structural applications but also by developments in the life sciences and in soft materials.  It is not at all uncommon for slightly imperfect thin cylindrical shells under axial compression or spherical shells under external pressure to buckle at 20% of the buckling load of the perfect shell.  A historical overview of shell buckling will be presented followed by a discussion of recent work by the speaker and his collaborators on the buckling of spherical shells.  Experimental and theoretical work will be described with a focus on imperfection-sensitivity and on viewing the phenomena within the larger context of nonlinear stability. 

We hope to bring together all Oxford researchers interested in Cryptography, in Quantum Computing and in the interactions between the two.

Please register at:  http://oxford-cryptography-day.eventbrite.co.uk

In his talk, Kerry will explore the pressing practical problem of how hurricane activity will respond to global warming, and how hurricanes could in turn be influencing the atmosphere and ocean

In his talk, Kerry will explore the pressing practical problem of how hurricane activity will respond to global warming, and how hurricanes could in turn be influencing the atmosphere and ocean.

I will describe how the moduli of various congruences between Hecke eigenvalues of automorphic forms ought to show up in ratios of critical values of $\text{GSP}_2 \times \text{GL}_2$ L-functions. To test this experimentally requires the full force of Farmer and Ryan's technique for approximating L-values given few coefficients in the Dirichlet series.

I will discuss the notion of badly approximable points and recent progress and problems in this area, including Schmidt's conjecture, badly approximable points on manifolds and real numbers badly approximable by algebraic numbers.

Leinster and Willerton have introduced the concept of the magnitude of a metric space, as a special case as that of an enriched category. It is a numerical invariant which is designed to capture the important geometric information about the space, but concrete examples of ts values on compact sets in euclidean space have hitherto been lacking. We discuss progress in some conjectures of Leinster and Willerton.