Termcard for Trinity Term 2000

Tuesday 1^st Week
Dr. Bruce Henning (St. Catherine’s)
“Variations on a Theme of Mach”
Mach bands are regions of lightness and darkness, not present in the stimulus, but arising from the visual system’s response to certain spatial distributions of luminance. Mach showed that these bands are not part of the objective luminance distribution, but brightness changes caused by some aspect of visual processing that has yet to be fully explained.

Tuesday 2^nd Week
Dr. Robin Wilson (Keble)
“Who invented Pascal’s Triangle”
Dr. Wilson will describe a brief history of combinatorics.

Wednesday 2^nd Week
Invariants Anual Dinner
This will be at 8:00pm at Pizza Express. We shall meet at 7:45pm at the Maths Institute.

Tuesday 3^rd Week
Dr. John Ball (Queen’s)
“Changes of Shape and Microgeometry”
Many crystalline materials, for example metallic alloys, undergo phase transformations involving a change of shape ar some critical temperature, leading to interesting and beautiful patterns of microstructure. The analysis of such patterns leads to some simply stated but difficlt questions of multi-dimensional calculus, that have deep connections with fundamental and unresolved questions of the calculus of variations.

Tuesday 4^th Week
Dr. Ian Wanless (Christ Church)
“Latin Squares”
A latin square of order n is an n by n array of n symbols in which every sympol occurs exactly once in each row and column of the array. The great mathematician Leonhard Euler introduced latin squares in 1783 as a “nouvea espèce de carrés magiques”, a new kind of magic squares.

Tuesday 5^th Week
Informal Gathering
With Finals approaching we decide to hold a more relaxing meeting. This will be in the Maths Institute at 8:00pm and the usual refreshments will be served.

Tuesday 6^th Week
Informal Gathering
Now Finals ar even nearer and so we will end the term’s programme either with another meeting just for refreshments at the Maths institue at 8:00pm, or possibly we will go out somewhere instead. We wish all those with exams the best of luck, and hope that everyone has a good summer vacation.