Termcard for Michaelmas 2012
Unless otherwise stated, events take place on a Tuesday in the Maths Institute at around 8:15pm
Tuesday Week 1, 9th October - Lewis Carroll in Wonderland
Robin Wilson
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? How good a mathematician was he? How influential was his work? In this illustrated talk, Robin will describe his work in geometry, algebra, logic and the mathematics of voting, in the context of his other activities and, on the lighter side, he'll present some of the puzzles and paradoxes that he delighted in showing to his child-friends and contemporaries.
Tuesday Week 6, 13th November - Mathematical Potpourri on Airplane Boarding
Anne Henke
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.
What is a good scenario to minimise the expected boarding times? Should,
for example, passengers in back rows board first? Or should passengers
on a window seat board first? The solution to these questions is deep and
it connects different areas of mathematics: probability, algebra,
differential equations.
My talk will be entirely elementary and no particular mathematical background
is needed. We will encounter elementary combinatorics, a proof using the
pigeonhole principle, and we will learn what the above question has to do with
mathematicians going to the cinema.
