Speaker: Prof John Lister (DAMPT)
Venue: Winstanley Lecture Theatre
Time: 6/2/2012 20:30, drinks from 20:15
Anyone awake at breakfast-time can observe that a stream of honey falling onto toast from a little height buckles and coils on impact. This talk will describe the physics and mathematics of a falling viscous thread. Prediction of the coiling frequency is surprisingly complex. And what happens when you move the toast?
All talks are to be held in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, and will begin at 8.30pm with port and orange juice from 8.15pm. Talks are for members only; non-members may join at the door. There are more details about membership at our website, along with links to previously held talks. Details of social events will be published at the first meeting.
Monday, 6th February: Prof John Lister (DAMPT):
Stretching, bending, twisting and coiling; building a fluid-mechanical sewing machine.
Anyone awake at breakfast-time can observe that a stream of honey falling onto toast from a little height buckles and coils on impact. This talk will describe the physics and mathematics of a falling viscous thread. Prediction of the coiling frequency is surprisingly complex. And what happens when you move the toast?
Monday, 20th February: Prof Gabriel Paternain (DPMMS):
Contact geometry in dynamics: the 3-body problem
We have known for a long time how to write down the equations of motion of a satellite that moves under the influence of the gravitational fields of the Earth and the Moon, but surprisingly, we still do not fully understand the long term behaviour of the satellite since we cannot explicitly solve the equations. At the end of the 19th century, Poincar\’e noticed the presence of chaos in the system and kick-started the modern theory of dynamical systems. Recently a new type of geometry called contact geometry (the odd dimensional relative of symplectic geometry) has been proposed as a tool for understanding this old problem in celestial mechanics. In the talk I will try to explain what contact geometry is and why it is relevant for the 3-body problem.
Monday, 5th March: Prof Geoffrey Grimmett (Stats Lab):
Y-Δ
Since its discovery around 1899, the star-triangle (or Y-Δ) transformation has become an important tool in the theory of disordered physical systems. It turns out in addition to have an important connection to tilings of the plane.
Venue: Winstanley Lecture Theatre
Time: 28/11/2011 20:30, drinks from 20:15
Come and celebrate Christmas with the TMS’s annual Call My Bluff event. Watch a Freshers’ Team take on a team drawn from the combined might of the rest of the university in a competition in which mathematical knowledge takes a second place to the ability to hold a good poker face. And if that is not reason enough to join us, there will be port
Freshers’ Team: Richard Freeland, Michael Rees and Hunter Spink.
Non-Freshers’ Team: Kathryn Atwell, Hiro Funakoshi and Jonathan Lee.
Hosted By: Mary Fortune.
Speaker:Dr Natalia Berloff (DAMPT)
Venue: Winstanley Lecture Theatre
Time: 21/11/2011 20:30, drinks from 20:15
When in 1937 liquid helium was first observed to flow with negligible viscosity through a narrow gap, it was clear that, at low temperatures, helium was different from ordinary fluids. The attemps to understand this phenomenon (called superfluidity by Pyotr Kapitza) led to the development of a two-fluid theory by Lev Landau. In this theory the fluid is modelled as an interacting mixture of superfluid and normal fluid components. In more recent times, an aspect of superfluidity that has been emphasized as most central is that the superfluid velocity is associated with the gradient of the phase of the macroscopic classical complex-valued matter field. Such a description impies that the system possesses a Bose–Einstein condensate (a form of matter that emerges when particles collapse into the same lowest-energy state) — with the matter field being the condensate wavefunction — and, therefore, can be described by a nonlinear equation for classical waves, known as the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. This description has the ingredients necessary to produce many of the aspects of superfluidity, such as frictionless flow below the Landau critical velocity, two-fluid hydrodynamics, quantized vortices, and metastable persistent flow in a doughnut-shaped geometry. These features of superfluidity have been experimentally observed not only in liquid helium, but also in ultracold gases and very recently in condensates of semiconductor microcavity polaritons — entities comprising both matter and light. How the condensate model can be modified and applied to study the dynamics of these various superfluid systems is the subject of my talk.
Speaker:Prof Kevin Buzzard (Imperial College)
Venue: Winstanley Lecture Theatre
Time: 7/11/2011 20:30, drinks from 20:15
Are there any rational solutions to x²+y²=-1? No, because there are no real solutions. How about x²+y²=3? Again the answer is no, but one way of showing this is by constructing a ‘local field’ — the 3-adic numbers — which contains the rationals as a dense subfield, and in which it’s easy to check that there are no solutions. It is far easier to solve equations in these local fields than in global fields such as the rationals, and conversely, sometimes solutions in all local fields can imply solutions in a global field too.
Speaker:Prof. Béla Bollobás
Venue: MR2, Centre for Mathematical Sciences
Time: 31/10/2011 7:15
The solution of a good mathematical problem often leads to new questions that are even deeper and more important than the original problem. In the talk I shall present some questions with close Trinity ties which arose about hundred years ago, have gone through several incarnations, and are still alive today. I shall also present the striking proof of a recent result concerning one of these questions
Speaker:Prof Zoubin Ghahramani (Dept. of Engineering)
Venue: Winstanley Lecture Theatre
Time: 24/10/2011 20:30, drinks from 20:15
Information plays a central role in 21st century science, commerce and society. We have huge data sets of measurements collected from large-scale scientific experiments, exciting commercial opportunities arising from exploiting web-scale information, and vast stores of knowledge available to society on the internet. Probabilistic approaches for modelling uncertainty and learning from data are essential to the effective use of these vast stores of information. Modern probabilistic approaches to building learning machines are grounded in the mathematics of the 18th century Reverend Thomas Bayes. I will describe the foundations of this field and our recent work on stochastic processes and nonparametric statistics, along with examples of a number of applications to big data problems such as information retrieval, recommendation, genomic data analysis, financial prediction, and robotics.
Speaker:Dr. Piers Bursill-Hall (DPMMS)
Venue: Winstanley Lecture Theatre
Time: 10/10/2011 20:30, drinks from 20:15
So you think you know about the world? And just because you’re a mathmo, you understand the world? How unlikely is that? This talk will be about how a bunch of mathmos noticed that they regularly talk to God (like all mathmos do) and this changed the course of history and created the modern world.”
All talks are to be held in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, and will begin at 8.30pm with port and orange juice from 8.15pm. Talks are for members only; non-members may join at the door. There are more details about membership at our website, along with links to previously held talks. Details of social events will be published at the first meeting.
Monday, 10th October: Dr Piers Bursill-Hall (DPMMS):
God, as you know, is a Trinity woman
So you think you know about the world? And just because you’re a mathmo, you understand the world? How unlikely is that? This talk will be about how a bunch of mathmos noticed that they regularly talk to God (like all mathmos do) and this changed the course of history and created the modern world.
Monday, 24th October: Prof Zoubin Ghahramani (Dept. of Engineering):
Probabilistic Learning Machines and the Information Revolution
Information plays a central role in 21st century science, commerce and society. We have huge data sets of measurements collected from large-scale scientific experiments, exciting commercial opportunities arising from exploiting web-scale information, and vast stores of knowledge available to society on the internet. Probabilistic approaches for modelling uncertainty and learning from data are essential to the effective use of these vast stores of information. Modern probabilistic approaches to building learning machines are grounded in the mathematics of the 18th century Reverend Thomas Bayes. I will describe the foundations of this field and our recent work on stochastic processes and nonparametric statistics, along with examples of a number of applications to big data problems such as information retrieval, recommendation, genomic data analysis, financial prediction, and robotics.
Monday, 31st October: Prof Béla Bollobás, FRS (DPMMS, Trinity College):
Long Life Problems
The solution of a good mathematical problem often leads to new questions that are even deeper and more important than the original problem. In the talk I shall present some questions with close Trinity ties which arose about hundred years ago, have gone through several incarnations, and are still alive today. I shall also present the striking proof of a recent result concerning one of these questions.
Monday, 7th November: Prof Kevin Buzzard (Imperial College):
Think locally, act globally
Are there any rational solutions to x²+y²=-1? No, because there are no real solutions. How about x²+y²=3? Again the answer is no, but one way of showing this is by constructing a ‘local field’ — the 3-adic numbers — which contains the rationals as a dense subfield, and in which it’s easy to check that there are no solutions. It is far easier to solve equations in these local fields than in global fields such as the rationals, and conversely, sometimes solutions in all local fields can imply solutions in a global field too.
Monday, 21st November: Dr Natalia Berloff (DAMTP):
Superfluid states of matter: from superfluid helium to polariton condensates
[TBA]
Celebrate the end of term at the TMS’s May Week garden party. Trinity College Fellow’s Garden (off Queens Road), Thursday 23rd June, 2:30-4:30.
We will have a surplus of Pimms, Food and hopefully sunshine. Entry will be free to members, and non-members can join on the door, so bring your friends. In the event of rain, we will be relocating to underneath the Wren Library.
