Rosemary Apple will recount the stories of a select few women in Mathematics and the conflicts they encountered trying to succeed in a male-dominated field.
Enrique Covarrubias will explain some of the basic concepts behind catastrophe theory, a successful branch of mathematics at the interface of dynamical systems, topology and geometry. He will tell us why it helped explain models of stability of ships at sea, bridge collapses, prison riots and war & peace between countries.
Nairn McWilliams will talk about stochastic models, which are constantly used to describe both past and future scenarios under uncertainty. He will give an introduction to Brownian motion and simple stochastic processes, and some of the basic analysis we can do on them.
Hugh Griffiths will show us why there can only be 17 different wallpaper patterns. There will be many pretty pictures!
Patricia Ritter will explain to us what string theory is and why it has been so popular for the past 30 years despite not providing any concrete predictions for the real world.
Elena Escobar will try to explain what theoretical physics is about. In particular, what the state of the art of the field was by the 1970s: the "Standard Model". She will also try to give an idea of the methods used and the mathematical ideas involved.
Jan Hilmar will look at some examples of what can go wrong when intersecting curves, and why it took so long for mathematicians to work out how to properly define intersection multiplicity.
Daniele Sepe will introduce some beautiful concepts that are used in the study of dynamical systems, ranging from topological to combinatorial. He will then explain how these concepts fit together using a remarkable example of Smale's.
Andrew Stothers will tell us how to take the hard work out of multiplying matrices.
Achim Nonnenmacher will explain the fundamentals behind modern search engines: how to abstract language to a vector space in which one can apply standard linear algebra techniques - with astonishing effects! He will show how democracy on the web leads to the eigenvector that made Google the world's most successful search engine.
David Urminsky will discuss one of the major difficulties in N-body computations: the case where two bodies approach either other arbitrarily closely. We look to the 2-body and 3-body problem for ways to overcome the difficulties in close encounters between bodies.
Gwyn Bellamy will tell us about the Lie Group E8 and why we should care about the recent computation of the 248-dimensional representation of it.
Evgeni Ovcharov will give an introduction to basic dispersive and wave partial differential equations (PDE's) and the analytical tools in their study. He will highlight the fundamental ideas in modern analysis that has shaped the subject.
Hugh Griffiths will explain how we encode the geometry of a surface into a knitting pattern, and why we would want to do this!
Jan Hilmar will describe (and demonstrate!) the ancient art of limbo-ing, and will tell us how polynomials can play the same game. How low can the polynomials go and who will be the winner?
Richard Archibald will explore Bach's notion that music, mathematics and philosophy were all different faces of the same thing. In particular, he'll look at the puzzle posed by the incomplete nature of the last movement of 'The Art of Fugue'.
Julia Collins will talk about the applications of braid theory to science and engineering, including robotics, quantum computing and cryptography.
Graeme Taylor will explain the concepts of Game Theory, including the famous Prisoners' Dilemma, and will show us why it only pays to be nice to those who co-operate with us. His slides may be found here.
