Past Events
Journal club (Riccardo Martini): Boundary graphs in tensor models
2020-10-23We will introduce boundary graphs in tensor models and describe their meaning and construction.
Presidential Lecture - "The Square Peg Problem" by Dr. Andrew Lobb
2020-07-30The phrase "A square peg in a round hole" means something or someone conforming to unsuitable surroundings. It's an unsolved conjecture over a century old that given any shape of hole - in other words any closed curve in the plane - you can always find four points on the curve that form the vertices of a square. This says that square pegs can be made to fit into any shape hole, not just into square ones! I'll talk about this conjecture, its history, recent progress, and surprising and beautiful connections with famously one-sided surfaces such as the Moebius strip and the Klein bottle.
Andrew Lobb was an undergraduate at Oxford University and then took up a Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard University for his PhD studies. During these studies, he became interested in low-dimensional topology and wrote his thesis on applications of quantum knot invariants to 4-dimensional problems. Dr. Lobb moved back to the UK for a postdoctoral position at Imperial College London, then returned to the USA for second postdoc at Stony Brook which included six months leave to take part in a program at MSRI. He has been at Durham University in the UK since 2011.
Colloquium: "Simplicial homology, part IV" by Dr. Guilherme Sadovski
2020-04-10Speaker: Dr. Sadovski is a member of this unit (visit his page)
Minicurse: Morse Theory
2020-04-01This session will represent an introduction to several more advanced topological topics that are important in different branches of mathematics and physics.
Minicurse: Morse Theory
2020-03-26We will discuss algebraic properties of knot surgery diagrams that turn out to be useful tools to simplify the description of a three manifod.