Category Archives: events

conferences, seminars, lectures, etc

Kinks?

Posted on 20/06/2017 by

I’ve just been at a conference called “Kinks 2”, or that might be “knkx 2” (I never saw it written down). But look at the list of topics: dynamics, functional equations, infinite combinatorics and probability. How could I resist that? … Continue reading →

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London Combinatorics Colloquia 2017

Posted on 13/05/2017 by

A brief trip to London for the two colloquia and a meeting of the committee, marred for me by the fact that I had come down with quite a bad cold (which, scarily, involved my losing my balance from time … Continue reading →

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3rd Scottish Combinatorics Meeting

Posted on 26/04/2017 by

This week we had the third in the series of Scottish Combinatorics Meetings. The series was begun by Kitty Meeks in Glasgow; she ran it for two years, and this year it moved to St Andrews. Fittingly, Kitty was invited … Continue reading →

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A week in Vienna

Posted on 26/03/2017 by

Last week, in the second week of Spring break in St Andrews, I was in Vienna, giving a course of lectures to the PhD students, at the invitation of Tomack Gilmore, a Queen Mary undergraduate now finishing his PhD with … Continue reading →

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A scary evening

Posted on 19/03/2017 by

The picture is of Tommy Flowers, who built Colossus, the first computer. It was built to break the German High Command’s Fish cipher (Sägefisch) in the second world war; its construction would be regarded as heroic or despicable depending on … Continue reading →

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Research Day 2017

Posted on 17/01/2017 by

Yesterday was the School’s third Research Day, a successful and enjoyable event involving contribution from all divisions. Hopefully the event is now self-sustaining. Short summaries of a few of the talks follow. The first two speakers both had “automata” in … Continue reading →

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Prospects in Mathematics, 2

Posted on 24/12/2016 by

I didn’t say anything about my own talk at the Prospects in Mathematics meeting. But soon afterwards I was re-reading Lee Smolin’s 2006 book The Trouble with Physics, and it resonated with some of the things I said. My topic … Continue reading →

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