Week 1, Tuesday 9 October MT 2012
8:15pm
L2, Charles Dodgson is best known for his ‘Alice’ books, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, written under his pen-name of Lewis Carroll. If he hadn’t written them, he’d be mainly remembered as a pioneering photographer, one of the first to consider photography as an art rather than as simply a means of recording images. But if Dodgson had not written the Alice books or been a photographer, he might be remembered as a mathematician, the career he held as a lecturer at Christ Church in Oxford University. But what mathematics did he do? See More
Desert Island Maths Dr David Acheson, Jesus College, University of Oxford
Week 2, Tuesday 16 October MT 2012
8:15pm
If you were marooned on a desert island, which 8 pieces of mathematics would you want with you, to help keep your spirits up? David presents his own personal choice, drawn from both pure and applied mathematics, with reasons. See More
Michaelmas 2012 Social: Poker Night
Week 3, Tuesday 23 October MT 2012
8:15pm
Quite self-explanatory; come along to the Mathematical Institute for a night of poker and generally good fun! See More
Did Galois deserve to be shot? Dr Peter Neumann, Queen’s College, University of Oxford
Week 4, Tuesday 30 October MT 2012
8:15pm
Évariste Galois died aged 20 in 1832, shot in a mysterious early-morning duel. His ideas, after they were published fourteen years later, changed the direction of algebra and have had a huge influence on mathematics. See More
Members’ Papers Various Speakers
Week 5, Tuesday 6 November MT 2012
8:15pm
This annual event gives our members the chance to shine by presenting their own papers. The usual time is divided into a number of short lectures by members of the Invariants society. All members are welcome to give a paper! See More
Mathematical Potpourri on Airplane Boarding Anne Henke, Jesus College, University of Oxford
Week 6, Tuesday 13 November MT 2012
8:15pm
When passengers board an airplane, they queue in arbitrary order. For simplicity, we assume that passengers are arbitrarily fast to get to their seat row, they are arbitrarily broad and arbitrarily thin. Each passenger will need precisely one minute to store his luagge away and take his seat. During this time, he blocks the way for passengers in rows further back in the plane. See More
Week 7, Tuesday 20 November MT 2012
8:15pm
Alan Turing’s ground-breaking 1937 paper introduced his concept of Universal Turing machine, which underlies the modern general-purpose computer. In 1939, he proposed generalizations based on ordinal logic and oracle machines, these being apparently motivated by attempts to model the mathematical mind in ways that evade the apparent limitations presented by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. See More
Week 8, Tuesday 27 November MT 2012
8:15pm
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