General Information
The Pure Postgraduate Seminar is held, during term time, on Thursdays at 4pm. Attendees meet at 3:30pm in the common room for tea and biscuits. Pub is a possibility afterwards. See the notice board on Level 9, every Thursday, for more information and last minute changes.Call for speakers (28 September 2010)
The Leeds Pure Mathematics Postgraduate Seminar will be organized this year by Stijn Vermeeren and David Bradley-Williams. We are hoping to get it started as soon as possible, on the usual time of Thursday 4pm. Hence we are looking for speakers.
If you are interested in giving a talk this term, please tell Stijn or DBW. Especially if you have already prepared a seminar and are able to speak within the next weeks, please tell us, so we can get the seminar going asap. But also let us know if you are willing to speak, but need some time to prepare: we will give you a seminar later in the term.
Schedule
- Thursday 27 January 2011 - 4pm, MALL
Mayra Montalvo - "Martin's Axiom" - Thursday 3 February 2011 - 4pm, MALL
Robert Barham - "The higher dimension Platonic solids"
Abstract: This talk will describe what sort of Platonic objects can exist in higher dimensions, and will try to give a variety of methods that allow us to draw representations of them. - Thursday 17 February 2011 - 4pm, MALL
Phil Ellison - "Quantum computing?!" - Thursday 24 February 2011 - 4pm, MALL
Naz Miheisi - "Physics in 2 minutes (via C*-algebras)" - Postponed
Andrew Reeves - "Catalan numbers" - Thursday 10 March 2011 - 4pm, MALL
Andrew Swan - Thursday 24 March 2011 - 4pm, MALL
Liliana Badillo
Schedule (previous term)
- Thursday 28 October 2010 - 4pm, MALL
Stijn Vermeeren - "The Banach-Tarski paradox"
Abstract: I will show how you can cut an apple into a finite number of pieces, and rearrange these pieces to make TWO apples, of the same size as the original one. But beware: you will need to do some axiom-of-choice cutting of non-measurable apple pieces. - Thursday 11 November 2010 - 4pm, MALL
Benedict Durrant - "The Complexity of the Real Line, as a Fractal"
Abstract: This talk covers the basic notions from computability of descriptive and normalised complexity. It also briefly covers the ideas of Hausdorff and Topological dimension. With this machinery out of the way we are able to consider the relation between a string and its complexity, specifically the set got by taking the Cartesian product of a string with it's normalised complexity - which it turns out (for any subset of the reals) is fractal. The talk will not be overly technical, but aims to give an explanation of the results from "On Hausdorff and Topological Dimensions of the Kolmogorov Complexity of the Real Line" [Cai and Hatmanis, 1994] in an accessible way. - Thursday 18 November 2010 - 4pm, MALL
Ahmet Cevik - " Intuitive Motivation for Higher Axioms of Infinity"
Abstract: This talk covers a gentle introduction to relative consistency and some basics of large cardinal assumptions in ZFC. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems will be given first. Then the notion of relative consistency will be discussed. It will be observed that some axioms of infinity are powerful enough to imply the consistency of ZFC. A result on the limits of large cardinal assumptions, Kunen's Inconsistency Theorem, will be reviewed. Finally, an open problem will be given due to the joint work of D.Friedman, P.Welch, H.Woodin related to the consistency strength of a large cardinal assumption. The talk will not be technical. The aim is just to give a general idea on higher axioms. - Thursday 25 November 2010 - 4pm, MALL
Alexandra Omar-Aziz - "Infinite Galois theory and profinite groups"
Abstract: In this talk, I shall first introduce profinite groups, and then introduce the Krull topology on the Galois group of an (infinite) Galois extension. With this topology, the Galois group becomes a profinite group. I shall then show how every profinite group can be realised as the Galois group of a Galois extension. - Thursday 9 December 2010 - 3pm, location to be confirmed
Thomas Wieber - "How a geometer proves the fundamental theorem of algebra"
Further Information
About the Pure Postgraduate Seminar: The Pure Postgraduate Seminar is a seminar series given by postgraduate students for an audience consisting mostly of other postgraduate students. Talks are about 50 minutes long. It is an excellent opportunity to get some experience in giving a presentation in an informal and pressure-free atmosphere, and at the same time share some captivating bit of mathematics with your fellow postgraduate students. You can but you do not need to talk about your own research. In fact many speakers prefer to talk about an entirely different topic, such as a nice bit of recreational mathematics or a proof that is elegant yet not widely known. In this view, we also positively encourage contributions from applied or statistics postgraduates, who want to speak about a pure topic.
For the academic year 2010-2011, the seminar is organised by Stijn Vermeeren (mmsv@leeds...) and David Bradley-Williams (mmdbbw@leeds...).
Photos
Some photos from past seminars are in the gallery here.
Previous years
- 2009/2010 academic year
- 2008/2009 academic year
- 2007/2008 academic year
- 2006/2007 academic year
- 2005/2006 academic year
- Previous years
Leeds/Manchester Combined Seminar
Once a year we hope to have a joint seminar with Manchester pure maths postgrads. This will take the form of an afternoon of short talks by Leeds and Manchester students, followed by dinner and quality time at the pub.
The last Leeds/Manchester joint postgrad seminar was in 2009 in Leeds.