Queen's College

A number is called transcendental if it is not algebraic, that is it does not satisfy a polynomial equation with rational coefficients. It is easy to see that the algebraic numbers are countable, hence the transcendental numbers are uncountable. Despite this fact, it turns out to be very difficult to determine whether a given number is transcendental. In this talk I will discuss some famous examples and the theorems which allow one to construct many different transcendental numbers. I will also give an outline of some of the many open problems in the field.

In the Greek mythology the hydra is a many-headed poisonous beast. When cutting one of its heads off, it will grow two more. Inspired by how Hercules defeated the hydra, Dison and Riley constructed a family of groups defined by two generators and one relator, which is an Engel  word: the hydra groups. I will talk about its remarkably wild subgroup distortion and its hyperbolic cousin. Very recent discussions of Baumslag and Mikhailov show that those groups are residually torsion-free nilpotent and they introduce generalised hydra groups.

I will look at some tools for proving expansion in the Cayley graphs of finite quotients of a given infinite group, with particular emphasis on Bourgain-Gamburd’s work on expansion in Zariski-dense subgroups of SL_2(Z), and speculate to what extent such expansion may be said to be “uniform”.

There appears to be no universally accepted rigorous definition of a "flexagon" (although I will try to give a reasonable one in the talk). Examples of flexagons were most likely discovered and rediscovered many times in the past - but they were "officially" discovered in 1939, a serendipitous consequence of the discrepancy between US paper sizes and sensible paper sizes.* I'll describe a couple of the most famous examples of flexagons (with actual models to play with of course), and also introduce some of the more abstract theory of flexagons which has been developed. Feel free to bring your own models of flexagons!

* The views expressed herein are solely those of the speaker, and do not reflect the official position of the Kinderseminar w.r.t. international paper standards.