Keynotes
The keynote address at TMT2021 will be delivered by
Colva Roney-Dougal, Random Games with Finite Groups
Kit Yates, The Maths of Life and Death: Understanding the mathematics behind epidemics
Abstracts:
Colva Roney-Dougal
Random games with finite groups
Imagine I had all of the elements of a finite group, in a bag. I ask you to close your eyes, and pick a few group elements out at random. What can be said about the result?
Kit Yates
The Maths of Life and Death: Understanding the maths behind epidemics
In this lecture, Dr. Kit Yates will look at some of the basic models and mathematics underlying the understanding of disease spread, and pick apart the meanings behind some of the terms we hear about in the news: from exponential growth and R to critical immunisation threshold and herd immunity.
Very little prior knowledge will be needed in order to enjoy the talk.
Biographies
Colva Roney-Dougal is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra at St Andrews. She is also known for her popularization of mathematics on BBC radio shows, including appearances on In Our Time about the mathematics of Emmy Noether and on The Infinite Monkey Cage about the nature of infinity and numbers in the real world.
She initially went to university to do a degree in English and Moral Philosophy, but got distracted along the way and wound up with a maths degree. Since then she has worked at Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Sydney. She is interested in both finite and infinite groups, computational methods and undecidable problems.
Dr. Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath. Alongside his academic position, Kit is also an author and science communicator. His first book, The Maths of Life and Death, is about the places where maths can have an impact on our everyday lives without us even realising it.
His research demonstrates that mathematics can be used to describe all sorts of real-world phenomena: from embryo formation to locust swarming and from sleeping sickness to egg-shell patterning. He is particularly interested in the role that randomness plays in Biology. His research into Mathematical Biology has been covered by the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, RTE, Scientific American and Reuters amongst others.
For further information or to contact the organisers tmt@gre.ac.uk.
To tweet about this event please use #IMATMT2021
