Event Details

Two short talks about open research problems, given by staff and postgraduate students, accessible to undergraduate students.

Speaker 1: Jessica Jay (lecturer)

Title 1: Traffic Jams, Infinite Post Offices, and the Jacobi Triple Product Identity

Abstract 1: Interacting particle systems are certain continuous time Markov processes concerning the movement of particles under some interaction rule(s). These processes originally came from physics and are now studied as interesting probability models for many real-world phenomena including traffic flow, queues in series and also disease/population spread.

In recent years research of myself and others has shown that studying natural probabilistic questions for such models can lead to proofs of combinatorial identities, both classical and new! In this talk we will see the first such instance of this, a probabilistic proof of the Jacobi triple product identity due to Balazs and Bowen (2018).

A natural question to ask is, what other identities can be found in this way?

Speaker 2: Rob Graham (student)

Title 2: Symmetry by Design: Clifford Group Equivariant Neural Networks

Abstract 2: Explore how embedding geometric symmetries directly into neural network architectures leads to faster, more accurate, and highly generalisable learning across indefinite quadratic spaces, from everyday Euclidean geometry to Minkowski Spacetime.