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, Poincare 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.