Saturday 17th October 2015

During the University's Festival of the Imagination (Friday 16th and Saturday 17th October), the Mathematics Institute will be pleased to welcome department alumni and other visitors to two talks on the Saturday afternoon. Tea and cake will be served during the intermission.

The talks will be at a level suitable for someone with some interest in mathematics (and who may or may not have done a mathematics degree at some point in the past). To book your place, click here.

14.00-14.45 - MS.02 - Martin Hairer (Warwick) - Taming infinities

Martin Hairer FRS is Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. After obtaining a PhD in physics from the University of Geneva, he held a position at the Courant Institute of New York University before moving to Warwick, where he has made major contributions in stochastic analysis and stochastic dynamics. He has received the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (2008), the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2008), the Wolfson Research Merit Award of the Royal Society (2009), the Fermat Prize (2013), and the Fröhlich Prize of the London Mathematical Society (2014). Prof Hairer was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. In the same year, he was awarded the Fields Medal "for his outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations, and in particular for the creation of a theory of regularity structures for such equations".

14.45-15.15 - Tea / Coffee and Cake - plus award of the Ron Lockhart prizes for 2014-15.

15.15-16.00 - MS.02 - Ursula Martin (Oxford) - The future of proof: will we need people in the age of computers? (Abstract)

Ursula Martin CBE is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. After a PhD in mathematics at Warwick, she held positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Manchester, and Royal Holloway University of London. She was the first female professor in any discipline at the University of St Andrews, and held the Chair of Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, before moving to Oxford in 2014. Prof Martin is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and of the British Computer Society. She has served on several governmental boards and panels, and was a member of the UK Defence Science Advisory Council. Her main scientific contributions have been in theoretical computer science and formal methods; in 2012, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to computer science.

Book your place now!

At 18:15, there will be a panel discussion on "Big Data. Big Opportunities" in the Cinema of the Warwick Arts Centre. This event is also free, but requires booking independently here.

To see the full timetable for the University Festival of the Imagination, and to book your places at some of the many exciting events, click here.