Past Events
Faculty Lunchtime Seminar: Quantum Gravity, Quantum Observables, Wilson Loops, and Geometric Flux (Prof. Reiko Toriumi, OIST)
2020-11-10Title: Quantum Gravity, Quantum Observables, Wilson Loops, and Geometric Flux
Abstract: I will brainstorm and introduce you to the type of problems that I tend to think about in quantum gravity. The title suggests some of the key concepts that I will visit in this talk in order to arrive at the recent interesting result that my collaborators and I discovered, namely, the notion of geometric flux in gravity.
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.