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Queen Mary Mathematics Research Centre QuIPS Seminar (Queen Mary Internal Postgraduate Seminar) |
Programme for 2009
All talks are on Wednesday at 12pm in room 103 (Maths). Lunch is provided after the talks. Everyone is welcome.
| Date | Speaker | Title |
7 Oct 2009 |
John Faben |
Reducing Graphs by Involutions |
21 Oct 2009 |
Andrew Drizen |
Improper Designs |
28 Oct 2009 |
No talk this week |
|
4 Nov 2009 |
No Talk this week |
Old Codgers Meeting in Reading |
11 Nov 2009 |
Emil Vaughan |
TBC |
18 Nov 2009 |
Colin Reid |
TBC |
25 Nov 2009 |
Problem Session |
Please Bring along any interestnig problems!! |
2 Dec 2009 |
| Date | Speaker | Title |
6 May 2009 |
Maria Apazoglou |
Real and Complex C* Algebras |
13 May 2009 |
Reamonn O'Buachalla |
An Introduction to Dirac Operators |
| Date | Speaker | Title |
14 Jan 2009 |
Andrew Drizen |
Generating Latin Squares Uniformly at Random |
28 Jan 2009 |
Nick Krempel |
A Foray into Combinatorial Game Theory |
4 Feb 2009 |
John Faben |
Who can name the biggest number? |
11 Feb 2009 |
Nick Illman |
Iwasawa's Lemma |
18 Feb 2009 |
No Talk This Week |
|
25 Feb 2009 |
Alex O'Neill |
The Spectrum of Graphs |
4 March |
Jonit Fischmann |
Hopping around the theory of Random Matrices (details tbc) |
11 March |
Emil Vaughan |
The Four Colour Theorem |
18 March |
Andrew Curtis |
Something about Formalism |
Page maintained by John Faben
Last update: March 11, 2009
| John Faben Who can name the Biggest Number? |
| Inspired by Scott Aaronson's essay "Who can name the Bigger Number?", we begin the talk with a game - everyone
was given 30 seconds and a piece of paper, and asked to write down the biggest number they could. The discussion proceeded
to an attempt to discuss some real-life big numbers - the number of cigarettes smoked in the world in a year, the number of
letters in the university library, the number of seconds in a human lifetime, the number of elementary particles in the observable universe, etc.
We then went on to discuss some really big numbers - we defined Knuth's Up Arrow Notation, and made an attempt to understand quite how big Graham's number really is. Then we moved onto *really* big numbers. After a (brief) discussion of Turing Machines and the Halting Problem we defined the Busy Beaver, and the Busy Beaver shift function, which provably grows faster than any computable function. |
| Andrew Curtis Something about Formalism |
| In its most austere form formalism is the philosophical doctrine that mathematics consists solely in the activity of manipulating strings of symbols by certain stipulated rules. This talk will be an overview of the topic, highlighting some of the theory's strengths and weaknesses. |