3 December – Senja Barthel (VU Amsterdam)
Title: Mathematical aspects in the study of Metal-Organic Frameworks
Abstract: Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are nanoporous crystalline materials whose extraordinary diversity arises from the vast combinatorial space of their molecular building blocks, enabling tailoring of structure and properties. This talk is motivated by the Nobel prize committee’s decision to award this year’s chemistry prize to the ‘discovery' of MOFs. This highlights both their scientific relevance and their broad technological promise, such as application in methane and hydrogen storage, carbon capture, filtration, and catalysis.
MOFs are the materials that initially got me into chemistry, due to their ability to realize interesting non-trivial topological realizations, including interpenetrations, linking, and braiding, which motivated Riya’s work. In this talk, I will introduce MOFs and motivate why not only topology but also geometry, graph theory, and group theory are central to their study. For example, pore shapes determine how guest molecules interact with the host framework, graphs derived from bonding networks provide insight into thermal transport, and crystallographic space groups are essential in structure determination. I will also include work with Hannah on describing the connectivity of crystalline structures using complexes.
10 December – Stavroula Makri (VU Amsterdam)