[TMS] AGM, Atiyah Lecture (Prof. Nigel Hitchin), and other updates

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The Trinity Mathematical Society will be hosting our Annual General Meeting on Monday, 2 May 2025, during which we will elect the next committee!
Event: TMS Annual General Meeting 2025
Date: Friday, 2 May
Time: 5pm
Location: Blue Boar Common Room, Trinity College (accessible via Green Street)
Agenda: Elections for TMS Committee 2025/26; pizza and refreshments
Here are the committee positions up for election, along with their official roles:

• President: The President shall coordinate the Committee and invite speakers.
• Vice-President: The Vice-President shall book the rooms and aid the President, stepping in as necessary.
• Secretary: The Secretary shall send weekly emails and publicise events.
• Treasurer: The Treasurer shall organise sponsorships, apply for College funding, and make sure we don’t go bankrupt!
• Membership Officer: The Membership Officer shall manage membership and organised socials.
• Constable: The Constable (usually an ex-officer) shall aid the Committee in its functions.
Eligibility: to run for a position, you must:

  1. Be a member of Trinity College.
  2. Email the current President, Eleanor (erm73@cam.ac.uk) by Wednesday, 30 May, announcing your intention of running.
  3. Prepare a brief speech to give at the AGM.
Responsibilities are shared across the whole committee, and everyone contributes to deciding what the TMS will be for the next year. The average weekly time commitment is manageable, especially when the committee looks out for one another!
Beyond the formal duties listed above, there’s actually a lot happening in the background (e.g. deciding how best to rickroll the TMS, or which apple variety to drop in the next talk). If you are interested in running for any of the roles and wish to take a peek at the fine print of the job description, or have any general worries/questions, I encourage you to reach out to any of the current committee members (see the footer of this email)! Don’t worry, we won’t bite.
And if you don’t wish to run for committee, still come along to support your friends, air your complaints about the current committee, eat some pizza, retract your complaints about the current committee, and exercise your democratic right to vote!
Also, the annual Atiyah lecture (jointly organised with The Archimedeans) will be given by Professor Nigel Hitchins, Wednesday, 7 May, 5pm-6.30pm, at the Babbage Lecture Theatre! Title and abstract to follow soon.
Finally, happy Easter break! Here’s a brief preview of Easter TMS activities:
  • TMS Peer Talks II (tentatively Wed 30 Apr)
  • TMS AGM (Fri 2 May)
  • Atiyah Lecture: Prof. Nigel Hitchin (Wed 7 May 5pm-6.30pm)
  • TMS merch (coming soon!)
  • (post-exam) Garden Party, Cricket Match (to be confirmed)

Atiyah lecture

[TMS] Week 5-8 Updates

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Week 5 – Pizza & Bubble Tea Social

Event: TMS Pizza & Bubble Tea Social

Date: Monday, 24 February
Time: 6pm – 9pm
Location: Burrell’s Field Common Room, Trinity College Burrell’s Field (58 Grange Road)
Why you should come: parallel play with example sheets we will attempt to play Mathematical Charades/Call My Bluff! (and there’s the usual abundance of board games too.)

Week 6 – Professor Ben Green

Title: Besicovitch sets and the Kakeya Conjecture

Speaker: Professor Ben Green
Abstract: In a preprint posted online on February 26th, Hong Wang and Josh Zahl announced a proof of the Kakeya Conjecture in 3 dimensions. I will explain what this means together with some of the history of the problem.
Date: Monday, 3 March
Time: 6pm
Location: MR2, Centre of Mathematical Sciences

Week 7 – Prof. Richard Nickl

Title: Bayesian inference for infinite dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems and ‘data assimilation’

Speaker: Professor Richard Nickl
Date: Monday, 10 March
Time: 7pm
Location: MR2, Centre of Mathematical Sciences

Week 8 – Dr Kasia Warburton + Citadel/Correlation One Europe Terminal

Title: Understanding glacier stability
Speaker: Dr Kasia Warburton
Abstract: Glaciers are enormous examples of viscous flow in nature. Their poorly constrained boundary conditions lead to large uncertainty in sea level rise predictions. In this talk, I’ll present some classical and much more recent results that employ linear stability analysis to understand glacier evolution, measurement, and observations.
Date: Monday, 17 March
Time: 7pm
Location: MR2, Centre of Mathematical Sciences

[TMS] Week 4 – Dr Andjela Sarkovic

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Dear All,

 

This coming Monday, we are grateful to have Dr Andjela Sarkovic deliver a combinatorics/probability talk, Monday 17 February, 7pm at MR2, CMS. And, do hang around for pizza and port/juice after the talk!

Title: Picking a spanning tree at random

Speaker: Dr Andjela Sarkovic
Abstract: A spanning tree of a graph is a tree that includes all the vertices of the graph and whose edges are a subset of the graph’s edges. In this talk, I will describe a couple of algorithms for selecting a spanning tree uniformly at random from the set of all spanning trees of a graph.
Date: Monday, 17 February
Time: 7pm
Location: MR2, Centre of Mathematical Sciences
——
Following positive vibes from the TMS Lent Talks, we are excited to announce a second series of TMS Peer Talks!
 
Event: TMS Undergraduate Peer Talks (Easter)
Details: Want to share about a mathematical idea that excites you? Want to hear about interesting mathematical perspectives from your peers? Enjoyed yourself in the Lent Peer Talks series? Do sign up to speak, or come along to attend the TMS Easter Peer Talks! We hope to organise an afternoon of accessible bite-sized nuggets. targeted at undergraduates, with minimal prerequisites.
• Talk durations range from 5 to 15 minutes, with brief QnAs and plenty of breaks and snacks.
• The main target audience (and level of assumed knowledge) is IB Maths, but students of all levels are very welcome to speak/attend.
• The intended flavour of talks is not to present original research (which will likely be inaccessible to the broad undergraduate audience), but to present a nice piece of maths (e.g. a fresh perspective on a concept taught in lectures, a toy example illustrating a powerful result, or a brief tour of an area of maths).
• The ultimate goal is for both speakers and audience to have lots of fun over sharing and discussing maths!

Date/Time: start of Easter (to be confirmed)
Location: MR2 (to be confirmed)

Registration link: https://forms.gle/VFQjXk1UXcsJ6qVc9 (register by 15 March)

———
Jane Street is organising a candle-making event for Women+ students this Tuesday, 18 February, 6pm! Details as follows:

 
Event: Jane Street Candle-Making (Women+)
Date/Time: Tuesday, 18 February, 6pm
Location: Hilton Hotel, Cambridge
Description: Jane Street is delighted to be hosting a candle-making workshop for female-identifying students! Join us in creating your very own scent, and you’ll also get the chance to network with some Women+ Streeters, eat some delicious food, and grab some SWAG! Register here by today (Friday, February 14th). We will email you on Monday, February 17th, to let you know if you have secured a spot. We look forward to seeing you there!
Registration link: https://forms.gle/mH8bfX7eAsJWyKuB8 (register by today)

[TMS] TMS Annual Dinner Registration

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Dear All,
Register here for the TMS Annual Dinner!

The form requires proof of payment to be included with the submission. Please upload an image as proof of £25 bank transfer with your CRSid as the payment reference.

Do check that the form is still accepting responses before making payment.

TMS Bank Account Details
Name: Trinity Mathematical Society
Sort Code: 20-17-19
Account Number: 40091049

If you have any questions about payment, please contact our treasurer, Samuel (sl2067@cam.ac.uk).
———

Event: TMS Annual Dinner

Date/Time: Sunday, 9 March evening
Location: Old Kitchens, Trinity College
Dress Code: Formal (jacket and tie, or equivalent; gowns not necessary)
Description: Join us for a monumental dinner celebrating a year’s worth of TMS events! On top of a mouth-watering array of food and drinks, there will also be an opera duet during the dinner, Libiamo ne’lieti calici, performed by Fredy Yip and Sarah Henderson! Many speakers will be attending too.

[TMS] Week 3 – Prof. Harvey Reall

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Dear All,

This coming Monday, we are grateful to have Professor Harvey Reall deliver a highly attractive talk about black holes, Monday 10 February, 7pm at MR2, CMS. And, do hang around for pizza and port/juice after the talk!

Title: What happens if you fall into a black hole?

Speaker: Professor Harvey Reall
Abstract: The usual answer to this question is “you get turned into spaghetti”. But this only applies to the simplest kind of black hole – one which is not rotating. With rotation, the answer is less clear, with some calculations indicating that it might be possible to escape destruction inside the hole, at least according to classical General Relativity. Recent work suggests that quantum effects might play an important role in destroying observers who fall into certain types of black holes. I’ll attempt to give a simple explanation of all of this.
Date: Monday, 10 February
Time: 7pm
Location: MR2, Centre of Mathematical Sciences

[TMS] G-Research Pub Quiz

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Dear All,

G-Research will be hosting a Pub Quiz in Cambridge on Tuesday evening, 25 February (Week 5); see below and the attached poster for details. Do sign up and come along!

Event: G-Research Pub Quiz
Date: Tuesday, 25 February
Time: 6pm – 8pm
Location: Cambridge; exact location to be confirmed after registration
Registration Link: https://qrco.de/beztqD

[TMS] Week 2 – Prof. Mike Tehranchi

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Dear All,

The coming Monday, we are delighted to have Professor Mike Tehranchi share about convexity at MR2, CMS! And, do hang around for pizza and port/juice after the talk!

Title: Fun with convexity
Speaker: Professor Mike Tehranchi
Abstract: Convexity appears in a number of seemingly unrelated contexts, both in applications as well as in pure mathematics. This talk will survey some fun facts about convex functions and convex sets. Topics will include convex duality, convexity in economics, volumes of convex sets, and unsolved open problems.
Date: Monday, 3 February
Time: 7pm
Location: MR2, Centre of Mathematical Sciences

[TMS] Week 1 – Prof. Tom Fisher

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Dear All,
For the first Monday of Lent, we are delighted to have Professor Tom Fisher kick off the term with a number theory talk at MR2, CMS! And, do hang around for pizza and port/juice after the talk!
Title: Local-to-global principles in number theory
Speaker: Professor Tom Fisher
Abstract: One of the basic motivating problems in number theory is to decide whether a system of equations (usually polynomials) has any solutions in integers or rational numbers. Sometimes it is possible to show that such a Diophantine problem has no solutions by working modulo a prime, or a power of a prime, or by showing that there are no real solutions. In such cases we say that there is a local obstruction. In this talk I will give some examples and non-examples of situations where the absence of a local obstruction is sufficient to ensure that the original (global) problem is soluble.
Date: Monday, 27 January
Time: 7pm
Location: MR2, Centre of Mathematical Sciences

[TMS] Week 0 – TMS Peer Talks, Jane Street MEGAGEM

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Welcome back to Lent! Hope the holiday has been restful and enjoyable for all.
This coming Wednesday, we have TMS Undergraduate Peer Talks:
Event: TMS Undergraduate Peer Talks
Talks: From Finite to Infinite Random Graphs (Ishan Nath), Special Relativity in Olympiad Geometry (Velian Velikov), Picturing Exact Sequences (Dylan Toh), Combinatorial Game Theory (Joël Huber), Convexity and Beer (Douglas Barnes), Squier’s Puzzle and Thompson’s Group (Henry Jaspars)
Details: A series of six 15-minute expository talks across various fields, delivered by fellow TMS peers, targeted at undergraduates, with minimal prerequisites. See attached for the schedule!
Date: Wednesday, 22 January
Time: 4-7pm
Location: MR2, Centre of Mathematical Sciences
Hope to see many of you there!
In addition, our sponsor, Jane Street, is hosting MEGAGEM night, this Thursday, 23 January, for TMS members! Here’s the sign-up link; see the attached flyer for details.

[TMS] Week 7 – TMS Quiz! and EGM

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Dear All,

This coming Monday, there’ll be a TMS Quiz, 7pm at Burrell’s Field Common Room!

Event: TMS Quiz

Date: Monday, 25 November
Time: 7pm – 9+pm
Location: Burrell’s Field Common Room, Trinity College
Why you should come: For the joy and relaxation of quizzing with others! And there’ll be pizza and port/juice as usual~
Hope to see many of you there!
In addition, we will be holding an Extraordinary General Meeting next Friday, 29 Nov, 1pm, at the CMS Core. The purpose of the EGM is for the TMS committee to discuss and confirm some minor technical amendments to our constitution, deemed necessary by the student union. All TMS members are eligible to come and vote on these amendments; do let me know if you wish to come.