The TMS termcard is now available at Events

Tonight’s talk will be given by Dr Emily Shuckburgh

Talk
Speaker: Dr Emily Shuckburgh
Title: From Flatland to Our Land – A Mathematician’s Journey through our Changing Planet
Mathematics is central to our understanding of the world around us. We live in a vast dynamical system, the many dimensions of which can be interrogated with mathematical tools. In this talk I will consider our changing climate. I will describe the scientific evidence that tells us how and why our climate is changing, and what the future may hold. In this journey I will pause at various waypoints to describe in more detail some of the insight different branches of mathematics are providing. Diverse examples will include applying ideas from dynamical systems research to create novel strategies for measuring the ocean mixing processes that are critical to the flow of heat and carbon through the Earth system, through to employing statistical learning techniques to improve future predictions of Arctic sea ice, currently in perilous decline. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Responding to the challenge requires robust scientific evidence to inform policies. Opportunities for mathematicians to contribute to this important issue abound.

The talk will take place at 8:30PM on Monday 20 November in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre. As usual there will be free port and juice served before the talk at 8:15PM. This talk is for members only, but there will be a chance to sign up for TMS life membership for £2.50.

Unfortunately, Professor Colm-Cille Caulfield can no longer make it tonight, so instead the TMS will be hosting a film night. We will be screening ‘Hidden Figures’, a 2016 biographical drama about black female mathematicians working for NASA during the Space Race.

The film will begin at 8:00PM on Monday 13 November in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre.

Tonight’s talk will be given by Dr Jason Miller

Talk
Speaker: Dr Jason Miller
Title: Random Trees
A tree is a graph without any cycles. Since there are only a finite number of trees with n vertices, one can imagine picking such a tree at random just like one can pick a card from a deck at random. It turns out that random trees have many applications and are ubiquitous in modern probability theory. In this talk, I will describe some of the basics of random trees and how they are related to some very exciting recent mathematical developments.

The talk will take place at 8:30PM on Monday 6 November in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre. As usual there will be free port and juice served before the talk at 8:15PM. This talk is for members only, but there will be a chance to sign up for TMS life membership for £2.50.

Unfortunately, there won’t be a TMS talk tonight. Instead, we will be guiding you around Cambridge for the TMS Pub Crawl. To join us, go to Trinity College Bar at 8:30 tonight (30 October), and we will take you to various pubs, including the Maypole, the Mitre and the Pickerel. We hope to see lots of you there!

Tomorrow’s talk will be given by Dr Michael Tehranchi

Talk
Speaker: Dr Michael Tehranchi
Title: The Prices of Call Options
A call option is a basic example of a financial derivative. Black, Scholes and Merton published in 1973 a theory for ‘rational pricing’ of call options, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1997. This talk will briefly explain this theory, and discuss how the pricing of call options has some interesting mathematical properties – touching on probability, convex analysis and even algebra.

The talk will take place at 8:30PM on Monday 23 October in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre. As usual there will be free port and juice served before the talk at 8:15PM. This talk is for members only, but there will be a chance to sign up for TMS life membership for £2.50.

Tonight’s talk will be given by Dr Andras Zsak

Talk
Speaker: Dr Andras Zsak
Title: Embedding Structures with Distortion
There is a wide variety of structures that are equipped with a distance. A familiar example is three-dimensional Euclidean space: here the distance is the length of the straight line segment joining two points. In this example there is an additional feature: the presence of vector addition and scalar multiplication. There are examples, however, that do not possess such additional features, and it is an important question to determine whether such arbitrary structures can be embedded into ones with a vector structure like Euclidean space. This has consequences for large data, algorithms, compressed sensing, etc., some of which have emerged in unexpected and surprising ways.

The talk will take place at 8:30PM on Monday 16 October in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre. As usual there will be free port and juice served before the talk at 8:15PM. This talk is for members only, but there will be a chance to sign up for TMS life membership for £2.50.

The TMS is up and running again for the new academic year!!

The first talk of the year will be tomorrow and will be given by Prof Imre Leader.

Talk
Speaker: Prof Imre Leader
Title: Infinite Games
Abstract: Suppose that we are playing a game, but the game might go on forever and so not end. How could we assign a winner or loser in that situation? This sounds like a silly question, but in fact it isn’t, and it leads to some very interesting phenomena.

The talk will take place at 8:30PM on Monday 9 October in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre. As usual there will be free port and juice served before the talk at 8:15PM. This talk is for members only, but there will be a chance to sign up for TMS life membership for £2.50.

To mark the end of exams and some (hopefully) excellent weather, the TMS is holding its annual Garden Party on Saturday 10th June. It will go from 1:30 to 3:30 on the Trinity College Fellows’ Bowling Green (off Great Court, entrance by the clock tower). In the event that the weather does take a turn for the worse, it will be held under the cloisters by the Wren Library.

Besides an assortment of snacks, cheeses and fruits, there will be Pimm’s and 12 gallons of ice cream available. Flavours include Vanilla, Strawberry, Creme Brulee and (of course) Brown Bread.

Entry is free for all members of the TMS but if you are not one, then it is very easy to join at the door for £2.50.

We hope to see many of you there!

The TMS annual general meeting happened on Wednesday 15th March, and a new committee was elected as follows:

We would like to thank the previous committee for their good work this year.

The Trinity Mathematical Society is proudly sponsored by Jump Trading and ATASS Sports.