University of Nottingham's SIAM & IMA Student Chapter

Streamlining global drug testing by modelling side effects of drugs on the heart
2026-03-20 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | Sir Clive Granger Building A31, and online
Gary Mirams is a Professor of Mathematical Physiology at the University of Nottingham. Gary and his team at the Centre for Mathematical Medicine & Biology work on modelling cardiac electrical activity. They collaborate with pharmaceutical companies such as GSK and Roche, as well as their regulators, and use simulations of drug effects on heart cells to predict potential side effects before human clinical trials. In his talk, Gary will share his journey in translating academic research into real-world impact.

Maths Beyond Academia: Data Science & Consulting with DAMSL
2026-02-25 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | Sir Clive Granger Building A31
Richard Wilkinson and Theo Kypraios are Professors of Statistics at University of Nottingham.

In 2017, Theo, Richard and 3 other UoN colleagues founded DAMSL, a datascience consultancy that works with clients from industry and the publicsector to help them extract value from their data. Their clients includeNetwork Rail, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, SC Johnson, Bootsand many others.

Mathematics in Drug Development with Linnéa Franssen
2026-02-04 13:00 - 14:00 UTC
Linnéa Franssen, Principal Modeling and Simulation Scientist at Roche, is joining us to share personal reflections and suggestions regarding opportunities to enter the pharmaceutical industry from academia as a modeller.

Linnéa holds a PhD in Mathematical Oncology from the University of St Andrews, following an MSci in Mathematics at the University of Glasgow. She joined Roche as a Postdoc in 2020, where she developed approaches to predict immunogenicity of therapeutic proteins. Transitioning to a permanent Scientist position in 2022, she supports protein therapeutic drug development through model-based predictions that e.g. support the optimization of drug dosing schedules for First-in Human dosing or enable selecting lead drug candidates.

LinkedIn post of the event: https://tinyurl.com/5xwmh5y6

Maths and Sport with Maria Angonese
2025-10-22 15:00 - 16:00 UTC
Maria Angonese, Head of Innovation at SportAnalytics, is joining us for an exciting talk about maths and sport!

Maria has a degree in Mathematics and over 10 years of consulting experience for top clubs, national teams, and leagues in various sports, particularly football and volleyball. She specialises in data analytics and custom metric development, with a focus on bridging technical staff needs and advanced data solutions.

The recording of the talk is now available: https://uniofnottm-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/emanuil_hristov_nottingham_ac_uk/ER_ISnC2godDmikMVRfkHvEBxAdRvBRRxS4-ZrF_ujUVWA?nav=eyJyZWZlcnJhbEluZm8iOnsicmVmZXJyYWxBcHAiOiJPbmVEcml2ZUZvckJ1c2luZXNzIiwicmVmZXJyYWxBcHBQbGF0Zm9ybSI6IldlYiIsInJlZmVycmFsTW9kZSI6InZpZXciLCJyZWZlcnJhbFZpZXciOiJNeUZpbGVzTGlua0NvcHkifX0&e=kKN648

There is also a LinkedIn page for the event: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sportanalytics-pro/

SIAM & IMA Mathematics Challenge 2023
2023-12-01 09:00 - 14:00 UTC
We are pleased to announce that the SIAM Maths Challenge returns on 1st December with £150 WORTH OF PRIZES TO BE WON! Questions will be available from 9-10am in Pope A15 and online from 10am here on this page, with scores and prizes beginning at 2pm in Pope A14 where there will be food and refreshments.

All undergraduate students are welcome and encouraged to work in teams of up to three members to tackle some maths challenges, in the form of a mix of short and long answer questions. These will test logic and lateral application of familiar ideas but will not require maths knowledge beyond A-level study. The best scoring teams from each year group will win prizes.

If you have any questions, please contact siam@nottingham.ac.uk. We hope to see you there!

QUESTIONS BELOW:

SIAM_Maths_Challenge_Q5738Download

SIAM & IMA Mathematics Challenge 2022
2022-11-25 09:00 - 17:00 UTC
Dear undergraduates, we are pleased to announce that the SIAM maths challenge returns on 25th November with £200 OF PRIZES TO BE WON! Questions will be available from 9-10AM in Pope A17, and online from 10AM at​, with scores and prizes beginning at 5pm in the same place, where there will be food and refreshments!

All undergraduate students are welcome and encouraged to work in teams of up to three members to tackle some maths challenges, in the form of a mix of short and long answer questions. These will test logic and lateral application of familiar ideas but will not require maths knowledge beyond A-level study. The best scoring teams from each year group will win prizes.

If you have any questions, please contact siam@nottingham.ac.uk. We hope to see you there!

Link to register your team: https://forms.office.com/r/CiJds0J1b6

Questions will be released on this page at 10am on 25th November. Check back then!

Question Below!

SIAM_Maths_Challenge_Questions-1

Answers below!

SIAM_Maths_Challenge_Answers-34250Download

WINNERS

Y1: Harrison Will & Leo (1st), Irine Pitsiladi , Chris Cogley, Tsz Ip (2nd), Benjamin Staunton, Md Azad, Abenash Baskaran (3rd)

Y2: Liangxiao LI, Qiancheng MA, Hongda YUAN

Y3: Jiaxuan Shi, Yuzhe Xu, Shengyi Li

Y4: Amirzhan Zhanseitov

PGR Practice Talks (Nov 2022)
2022-11-14 14:00 - 17:30 UTC
The SIAM & IMA Student Chapter is organising a PGR Practice Talk, giving PGR students the opportunity to present their work and ask for input from other PGR students. The event will be held on Monday the 14th of November, from 14:00-17:30 in Room D04, Monica Patridge Building (formerly known as Teaching and Learning building).

Come along and support your fellow PGRs! Drinks and Snacks will be provided.

Programme:

14:15 – Liam Critcher: The impact of household structure on herd immunity

This work concerns vaccination, in particular the use of disease-induced herd immunity; the spread of infection can be considered as a targeted vaccine, with an aim to prevent a major outbreak. The required proportion to be targeted in order to do so is referred to as the disease-induced herd immunity level. Often heterogeneity in the population can lower the disease-induced herd immunity level. We consider disease-induced herd immunity in the households model and compare it to the classical herd immunity level in which individuals are vaccinated uniformly at random among the population.

14:35 – Adam Shaw: Chiral Yang-Mills and complex Electromagnetism

14:55 – Niamh Martin: Temporal effects in epidemic modelling

15:15 – Asmaa Albuqami: Model Assessment for Stochastic Epidemic Models

In this talk, a novel method for assessing goodness-of-fit for a Susceptible-Infective-Removed (SIR) stochastic epidemic model will be discussed. The time-rescaling theorem is considered to assess the model adequacy for the Markovian SIR model. Our method assumes that the data set has been generated by the Markovian SIR model and then a vector of rescaled waiting times can be calculated using exponential distribution properties. The distribution of the rescaled waiting times is compared to the exponential distribution with rate one using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The performance of our proposed method is evaluated using simulated outbreak data sets. We simulate different complete data sets from the Markovian SIR model with linear infection rate (MSIRL), the Markovian SIR model with non-linear infection rate (MSIRNL), and the non-Markovian SIR with gamma infectious period. Then, we aim to discover if our method has the ability to identify the differences between the data and the Markovian SIR models ( when the wrong model is applied to the data set). Our findings illustrate that the vector of the rescaled waiting times appears to work well as a measure of model adequacy in the case of complete data.

10-minute break

15:45 – Adam Blakey: Placental haemodynamics: Transport effects at the organ scale

The placenta provides nutrients, such as oxygen, to developing fetuses — and is therefore vital to fetal development. It brings maternal and fetal blood close together, allowing nutrients to diffuse across thin separating barriers in the fetal arterial tree structure. Structurally, the placenta is divided into placentones: compartments that are partially separated by so-called septal walls. An approach to modelling maternal blood flow is to treat the fetal arterial tree as a porous medium; several authors have utilised this on representative placentone geometries, mainly focusing on arterial supply. However, whilst these simulations are a useful indicator of organ-level behaviour, they fail to describe the effects of the blood flux between neighbouring placentones, as well as neglecting the importance of maternal venous return. In 2020, a new phenomenon was discovered called the placental contraction, which is yet to be mathematically modelled. I will present some in-silico organ-scale maternal blood flow simulations, which use discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods (DGFEMs), on the Brinkman equation to model blood flow on representative placental geometries, coupled to a reaction-advection-diffusion equation to model nutrient transport. I will show notable blood flux passing between placentones, the importance of including maternal venous return on the uniformity of nutrient exchange, and how the recently-observed placental contraction phenomena could be vital in redistributing blood and encouraging venous return.

16:05 – Sonia Dari: Modelling the role of Matrix Metalloproteinases in the persistence of chronic wounds

Treating chronic wounds is a developing area of research; as such, understanding the biochemistry and pharmacology that underpins wound healing is of high importance. Biological research suggests that one such cause for the emergence of chronic wounds is deregulated apoptosis. In particular, chronic wounds are particularly susceptible to high levels of Matrix Metalloproteinases (MMPs), which cease to be beneficial and cause destruction of the extracellular matrix (ECM). In this talk, we propose a mathematical model that focuses on the interaction of MMPs with the ECM using a system of partialdifferential equations. We examine the qualitative features of the resulting travelling wave solutions observed in using parameters for healthy biological functioning and observe how these change for varying apoptotic rates.

16:25 – Alice Thompson: Multi-strain models for nosocomial infections featuring environmental transmission

Nosocomial infections have been a growing problem in hospitals for over 50 years, with most of these infections being due to the introduction and misuse of antibiotics. With motivation from a unique data set, this talk discusses how transmission networks can be reconstructed for a multi-strain outbreak in a hospital environment. This research focuses on the use of genetic data, collected using Whole Genome Sequencing techniques, and epidemiological data from patients and surfaces to reconstruct transmission networks of various stains and species of Klebsiella pneumoniae Carbapenemase (KPC)-producing bacteria. In this talk, we will first introduce the data set and then discuss the multi-strain transmission model and its augmented likelihood. Next, we discuss the use of MCMC and data augmentation, and the results yielded when using this method on a simulated data set. Finally a new model will be introduced which also incorporates environmental data and enables environment to be part of the transmission network.

16:45 – Jiale Tao: Bayesian Detection and Prediction of Disruptive Events in Twitter Data

The volume of tweets on Twitter is increasing exponentially, thus providing us with numerous opportunities for detecting the occurrence of major events in real-time. We develop a state-space model for detecting disruption on the National Railway in Great Britain in a timely fashion, by using the content and volume of tweets referring to delays and disturbance in the railway. A time-inhomogeneous Poisson process, lambda(t), is proposed to model the number of tweets whose time-dependent intensity function is parameterized such that it captures the observed periodic pattern in the data. A hidden Markov process that represents the state of the railway through time (‘normal’/ ‘abnormal’) then modulates the Poisson process. We develop a computationally efficient MCMC algorithm to learn the parameters governing lambda(t) and infer the state of the railway through time by utilizing a Forward-Backward algorithm to efficiently update the unobserved process. We demonstrate through extensive simulation studies that (i) we can successfully recover the model’s unknown parameters, (ii) predict the unobserved state with high accuracy framework our results are robust model misspecification. Finally, we illustrate via Bayesian filtering how to predict the future state of railway in real-time given the observed number of tweets.

Understanding our online social networks: information flows and other pairwise relationships online
2022-10-24 13:00 - 14:00 UTC
Location: Monica Partridge Building C10

SIAM & IMA Student Chapter External Speaker Seminar: Bridget Smart

The SIAM & IMA Student Chapter are happy to host Bridget Smart, University of Adelaide, for a seminar talk Monday 24th October from 13:00 to 14:00. The talk will be held in person in C10, Monica Partridge Building.

Abstract

Social media is a platform for people to share ideas, create change and build strong and meaningful connections with others. The role that social media plays in shaping our world view is not yet fully understood, but its effects have been felt in areas ranging from politics to public health.I will give an overview of my own research, where I aim to understand how what we see online shapes our actions and opinions, to better understand phenomena including echo chambers, fake news and disinformation campaigns using information flows and measuring similarity between point processes. To provide context, I will present a case study from a recent paper, #IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war. I will discussion how using a variety of techniques including information theoretic measures, sentiment and linguistic analysis, and time series techniques we can understand how bot activity influences wider online discourse. I will also provide an overview of the work of my broader group, which encompasses NLP, Bayesian epidemic modelling and linguistic analysis of text data.

Biography

A current M.Phil student in Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Adelaide, I am currently working to better model and understand our online social networks. My background is in applied mathematics and statistics and I have worked on a broad range of projects during my M.Phil. I’m passionate about using mathematics to enable stronger understandings of complex systems and communicating my work with decision makers.

Movie Night - Good Will Hunting
2022-09-30 17:00 - 19:30 UTC
On behalf of the UoN SIAM & IMA student chapter, I would like to let you know that we will be hosting a movie night! The movie that will be shown will be Good Will Hunting.

The film will be shown in Chem X1 on Friday 30th September at 5:00pm. There will be drinks and snacks provided! After the movie the fun will be continuing to Mooch at the Student Union at 7:30pm! Current members of the student chapter committee will be at the event if you have any questions regarding joining the committee or if you’re interested in becoming a member of SIAM. We hope to see you there!

Movie Night - Interstellar
2022-06-01 17:00 - 19:30 UTC
On behalf of the UoN SIAM & IMA student chapter, I would like to let you know that we will be hosting a movie night! The movie that will be shown will be Interstellar.

The film will be shown in Monica Partridge A03 on Wednesday 1st July at 5:00pm. There will be drinks and snacks provided! Please see attached the poster for the event. After the movie the fun will be continuing to Mooch at the Student Union at 7:30pm! Current members of the student chapter committee will be at the event if you have any questions regarding joining the committee or if you’re interested in becoming a member of SIAM. We hope to see you there!

Towards a media ecology view of mathematical history
2022-03-30 14:00 - 15:00 UTC | Maths A17
We’re delighted to be hosting Peter Ashwin for a talk via Microsoft Teams

Abstract

The development of mathematical concepts, theories and applications has been enabled by the emergence of new technologies of thought and communication (media, understood in the widest sense possible) that have given new approaches to mathematical questions. These new approaches compete with existing approaches to partially or completely replace previous ways of approaching these questions, as well as giving rise to new questions that could not be asked before. I will discuss this in relation to some developments that contributed to the emergence of calculus in the late 17th century. I will also speculate on possible impacts of the current electronic media revolution on mathematical thinking and communication.

Biography

Peter is a Professor of Mathematics specializing in dynamical systems theory and computational modelling at the University of Exeter. His research involves looking at nonlinear dynamical systems and applications: bifurcation theory and dynamical systems, especially synchronization problems, symmetric chaotic dynamics and spatially extended systems and nonautonomous systems.

Peter is currently PI of the EPSRC funded project “Applied Nonlinear Nonautonomous Systems: Theory, Methods and Applications” starting 2020 and am the Exeter PI for the EU Marie Curie ITN programme “CriticalEarth” running 2021-2025. As well as this, Peter is Associate Editor for the journals Chaos: An interdisciplinary journal of nonlinear science, Dynamical Systems; an International Journal and Mathematical Neuroscience and Applications and a member of the EPSRC peer review college. For 2021-23 he is serving on the Council of the London Mathematical Society.

The talk will be streamed in Maths A17. Cakes and snacks will be provided! Link to join online below:

Join conversation (microsoft.com)

Movie Night - Hidden Figures
2022-03-04 16:30 - 19:00 UTC
On behalf of the UoN SIAM & IMA student chapter, I would like to let you know that we will be hosting a movie night! The movie that will be shown will be Hidden Figures, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe and others… “”Hidden Figures” is the incredible untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.” (https://www.filmjabber.com/movie-synopsis/hidden-figures.html)

The film will be shown in Psychology A1 on Friday 4th March at 4:30pm. There will be drinks and snacks provided! Please see attached the poster for the event. After the movie the fun will be continuing to Mooch at the Student Union at 7:00pm! Current members of the student chapter committee will be at the event if you have any questions regarding joining the committee or if you’re interested in becoming a member of SIAM. We hope to see you there!

From growing neurons and sunflowers to liquid crystal elastomers and elephant trunks: the fascinating dynamics of active filaments
2022-02-02 14:00 - 15:00 UTC | via Microsoft Teams and streamed in D09, Monica Partridge Building
We’re delighted to be hosting Alain Goriely for a talk via Teams.

Abstract: The natural and artificial world around us is full of active filamentary structures that respond to external stimuli and modify their internal structures through growth or remodeling to achieve specific functions. For instance, to survive and to thrive, plants rely on their ability to sense multiple environmental signals, such as gravity or light, and respond to them by growing in a particular direction and by changing their shape. Similarly, during development, neurons sense their environment to grow and interconnect different regions of the brain. Octopus arms and elephant trunks are other magnificent examples of the power and beauty of activated filamentary structures. In engineering structures, certain liquid crystal elastomers can be shaped into filaments that respond and bend towards incident light with enticing possibilities for new devices. These systems share the same slender geometry, the same mechanical constraints, and they all face three important challenges: how is the external signal transduced to the microstructure? How is it activated? How should the microstructure be organised/designed for a particular function?

In this talk, I will discuss a general mathematical theory of active filaments based on morphoelasticity and dimensional reduction. In this approach, multiple stimuli can be integrated at the microscopic level to produce curvature and torsion at the macroscopic level, thus modifying the filament shape and position with respect to the stimuli. General principles for microstructure organisation and activation can then be obtained. More interestingly, this feedback loop of shape shifting based on external sources creates complex dynamics akin to actual natural behaviours and can be used to find elegant solutions to functional problems.

From growing neurons and sunflowers to liquid crystal elastomers and elephant trunks: the fascinating dynamics of active filaments. Video also available using the following link:Watch ‘External Speaker Seminar (Alain Goriely): From growing neurons and sunflowers to liquid crystal elastomers and elephant trunks: the fascinating dynamics of active filaments’ | Microsoft Stream

Movie Night - A Beautiful Mind
2021-12-03 16:15 - 18:45 UTC | Hallward Cinema Room, LG140, Hallward Library, Road University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD
Join us for our movie night, complete with free drinks and snacks! We are showing A Beautiful Mind, a biographical drama based on the life of the schizophrenic Mathematician, John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics and Abel Prize winner.

Doors open at 16:15 for a 16:30 start. The movie is 2 hours and 15 mins long and we will be heading to a pub afterwards. Hope to see you there!

PGR Practise Talks (Dec, 2021)
2021-12-02 13:15 - 15:50 UTC | Room E04, Monica Patridge Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2QH
The SIAM & IMA Student Chapter is organising a PGR Practice Talk, giving PGR students the opportunity to present their work and ask for input from other PGR students. The event will be held on Thursday the 2nd of December, from 13:00-15:50 in Room E04, Monica Patridge Building (formerly known as Teaching and Learning building).

We will also live stream any in person and any online talk via Teams. The link will become available on the day itself.

Programme

13:20 Alexander Nagen: Induced Standard Model

This talk will be about a re-formulation of the Standard Model of particle physics, including the right-handed neutrinos, based on induced gravity. An interesting problem is to find out how the right-handed neutrinos contribute to the Standard Model by itself. First, some background will be outlined. Then, the author will talk about their work on this problem. The author will conclude with problems that may be addressed in future research.

13:50 Adam Blakey: FEMs for Placental Haemodynamics

The placenta provides nutrients and oxygenated blood to developing foetuses, and is therefore vital to a foetus’ survival. I will talk about the outlook of my PhD project and present some basic computational simulations of maternal blood flow in human placentas using DG FEMs in representative 2D geometries.

14:15 Alexander Lewis: Stein’s Method on Manifold with Boundary

Since its inception, Stein’s method has been found to provide powerful, easy-to-construct bounds on probability metrics. At first, Stein applied this framework for comparisons with the normal distribution, however the field has now grown to encompass many classes of distributions on many different spaces. In this talk I will be presenting my current research on how to extend the theory of Stein’s method from Riemannian manifold to manifold with boundary.

14:40 Thomas Hall: Markov-type Diophantine Equations and their Underlying Geometry and Combinatorics

It turns out that the Diophantine equation dxyz = ax^2 + by^2 + cz^2 is intimately linked to the behaviour of certain lattice triangles under an operation called “mutation”. In this talk, we will explore this connection and show how to solve such an equation.

15:10 Robert Barnet: Pore-scale open-source multi-domain solvers for ionic transport and electrochemistry in electrolyte solutions

In this work we present open-source solvers, built upon the finite volume library OpenFOAM, solving the Stokes-Poisson-Nernst-Planck (SPNP) model for multi-domain ionic transfer in dilute electrolyte solutions. Many real-world applications of SPNP, such as electrochemical energy storage, reinforced concrete and oil extraction, also include heterogeneous reactions exchanging mass between ionic species. As such, alongside our solvers, we present our formulated set of boundary conditions to model this reactive mass exchange between species, constrained by mass and charge conservation. After outlining the governing equations we perform some dimensional analysis, giving a qualitative description of the different possible transport regimes, quantified by the ratios between the forces inducing ionic transport. Later we give a brief description of the numerical algorithms, based upon the PIMPLE algorithm, underpinning our pore-scale solvers (pnpFoam and pnpMultiFoam) and semi-Newton iterative algorithm used to solve our heterogeneous reactive conditions (mappedChemicalKinetics). We later verify, using one-dimensional test cases, the accuracy of our solvers and conditions. Results are compared against high-order spectral results obtained with the MatLab toolbox Chebfun. Since a large number of applications of SPNP involve complex porous geometries (e.g., batteries involve a porous solid electrode flooded with fluid electrolyte), we later consider a three-dimensional randomly generated porous domain of solid and fluid. Finally, we present preliminary results on applying our work towards a real-world commercial battery cell (LGM50), with hopes to give a comparison with experimental data found in.

15:30 Niren Bhoja: Spin(10), Octonions and the Standard Model.

In this talk I explore the spinor representation of Octonions on Cliff_{10} to construct the Lie algebra of the Lie group Spin(10), the usually agreed upon GUT of the standard model.

SIAM & IMA Student Chapter Mathematics Challenge
2021-11-10 12:00 - 2021-11-11 12:00 UTC | Various
NOTE: you needed to have signed up to the event by October 20th 2021. Please contact us if you still want to take part and we will see what we can do.

Schedule:

Wednesday, 10th November

10:30 to 11:00, Keighton Auditorium: Introduction and rules12:00 to 13:00, Room TBC: Free lunch and access to questions

Thursday, 11th November

12:00, via Form TBC: Deadline for solutions hand in

Wednesday, 17th November

10:00 to 11:00, Keighton Auditorium: Announcement of prize winners

A Good Mathematician is a Lazy Mathematician
2021-11-04 14:30 - 15:30 UTC | via Microsoft Teams
Title

A Good Mathematician is a Lazy Mathematician

Abstract

I am not sure when I first heard this phrase, I suspect it was used by one of my sixth form maths teachers, but I have increasingly come to realise how true this is – and what is more remarkable this laziness has actually shaped the way we, and perhaps society, think about mathematics.

The talk will introduce me and give some background about myself and my career to provide context. The main part of the talk will explore some of the short cuts of mathematics, and the influences they have had. Examples will include some of Euler’s thinking and ‘clock arithmetic’ and the use of logarithms pioneered by Napier, Briggs and Oughtred. The talk will be illustrated with slides, and there will also be some mathematical ‘props’ to show.

The talk will conclude with a brief description of some of the ways government uses mathematics, and opportunities of engaging with this, either as employees or otherwise.

Biography

Ed’s professional career has been spent as a civil servant in the MOD scientific branch, initially the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency and subsequently the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. This followed a degree in mathematics at Loughborough University.Throughout this time Ed has evolved from a junior research scientist to an experienced leader and manager. Currently developing and growing strategic partnerships to ensure Science and Technology can create impact and prosperity across the UK. Ed is a Visiting Professor at Loughborough University.Ed is an experienced Non-Executive Director and Trustee of several charities and holds fellowships of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the Royal Aeronautical Society, and the Royal Society for the Arts.

Check back on the day of the event for the Teams link.

This will also be streamed in C12, Monica Partridge Building for those on campus.

Footnotes to Turing (1952): Some Modern Challenges in Pattern Formation
2021-10-28 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | via Microsoft Teams
Abstract

Motivated by recent work with biologists, I will showcase some mathematical results on Turing instabilities in complex domains. This is scientiﬁcally related to understanding developmental tuning in a variety of settings such as mouse whiskers, human ﬁngerprints, bat teeth, and more generally pattern formation on multiple scales and evolving domains. Some of these problems are natural extensions of classical reaction-diffusion models, amenable to standard linear stability analysis, whereas others require the development of new tools and approaches. These approaches also help close the vast gap between the simple theory of diﬀusion-driven pattern formation, and the messy reality of biological development, though there is still much work to be done in validating even complex theories against the rich dynamics observed in nature. I will emphasize throughout the role that Turing’s 1952 paper had in these developments, and how much of our modern progress (and difficulties) were predicted in this paper. I will close by discussing a range of open questions, many of which fall well beyond the extensions I will discuss, but at least some of which were known to Turing.

I grew up in New Mexico, USA, where I earned undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 2012, and a Masters degree in Mathematical Analysis in 2014. I then obtained a DPhil (PhD) in Mathematics within the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2018, and continued as a postdoc in the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology before becoming a Departmental Lecturer in Applied Mathematics jointly between these two groups. I left Oxford in September of this year to join the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Durham University, where I am an Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics.

Check back on the day of the event for the Teams link.

This will also be streamed in A17, Mathematical Sciences Building for those on campus.

The Mathematics of the Maya (and Other Stories)
2021-10-14 14:00 - 15:00 UTC | via Microsoft Teams and streamed in E02, Monica Partridge Building
Watch the recording below.

In the United States, the second Monday of October is commonly referred to as “Columbus Day”, a holiday meant to commemorate the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492. However, given the false and problematic nature of this narrative, many Americans in recent years have begun rebranding this holiday as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”, to instead recognize the native people of the Americas who were impacted by imperialism and colonialism. To help honor the occasion, we’ll be discussing the mathematical achievements of one of the oldest civilizations in the Americas, the Maya, who lived in southern Mexico and central America as early as 4,600 years ago.

In this talk, we will introduce the Maya numeral system, which is simple enough to only require three symbols, yet powerful enough to represent large numbers easily and efficiently. We’ll observe how to perform basic arithmetic operations in their system (such as addition and multiplication), as well as how to extend their system to capture mathematical ideas that the Maya may have never used (such as rational and real numbers). Then, we’ll broaden our scope and take a brief tour of numeral systems of other civilizations throughout history and around the world, looking at their motivations, benefits, and disadvantages. By studying these numeral systems comparatively, we can improve our understanding of our own system of numbers, appreciate what makes the Maya system unique and useful to this day, and gain a deeper understanding of civilizations and cultures, past and present. Also, if time permits, we will see what makes the number 252 special.

This talk is intended for people of all mathematical backgrounds. No prerequisite knowledge is required.

Hakim is a Preceptor in the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University, where he primarily teaches undergraduate students. Originally from New York City, he attended graduate school at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., earning his Ph.D in mathematics in 2017. Although his main research areas were in logic and computability theory, Hakim’s academic interests also include number theory, recreational mathematics, philosophy, the history of mathematics, and mathematics/STEM education.

Understanding Sensory Induced Hallucinations: From Neural Fields to Amplitude Equations
2021-10-07 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | A17, Mathematical Sciences Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, United Kingdom
Explorations of visual hallucinations, and in particular those of Billock and Tsou [Neural interactions between flicker-induced self-organized visual hallucinations and physical stimuli. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(20):8490-8495, 2007], show that annular rings with a background flicker can induce visual hallucinations in humans that take the form of radial fan shapes. The well-known retino-cortical map tells us that the corresponding patterns of neural activity in the primary visual cortex for rings and arms in the retina are orthogonal stripe patterns. The implication is that cortical forcing by spatially periodic input can excite orthogonal modes of neural activity. Here we show that a simple scalar neural field model of primary visual cortex with state-dependent spatial forcing is capable of modelling this phenomenon. Moreover, we show that this occurs most robustly when the spatial forcing has a 2:1 resonance with modes that would otherwise be excited by a Turing instability. By utilising a weakly nonlinear multiple-scales analysis we determine the relevant amplitude equations for uncovering the parameter regimes which favour the excitation of patterns orthogonal to sensory drive. In combination with direct numerical simulations, we use this approach to shed further light on the original psychophysical observations of Billock and Tsou. This is joint work with Abigail Cocks, Stephen Coombes, Alan Johnston (Nottingham, Psychology) and Daniele Avitabile (VU Amsterdam)

Watch the recording below.

Movie Night – Gifted
2021-10-01 16:15 - 18:00 UTC | B1, Physics Building, University Park, Nottingh, NG7 2RD, United Kingdom
Join us for our next movie night, complete with free drinks and snacks! We’ll show the film Gifted, which features seven-year-old Mary Adler with a remarkable mathematical talent.

This is a good social activity and we promote joining the society before the movie and are available to talk to students afterwards about the Chapter and the joining process.

Time to Write
2021-06-25 14:00 - 16:30 UTC | via Gather Town
The first SIAM&IMA Student Time to Write event where PGR students, especially those currently preparing for annual reviews, have the opportunity to write together. They will also be able to give and receive feedback on their written work. It will be a mix of Pomodoro technique sessions with optional peer feedback sessions, taking place via Gather Town.

Mathematicians at War
2021-06-21 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/London) | via Microsoft Teams
Abstract

British mathematicians responded to the First World War in a variety of ways. Some volunteered their mathematical skills for work at the Royal Aircraft Factory where they could experience the risky practice of flying, while others went to the National Physical Laboratory where, safely on the ground, they did experiments using wind tunnels. Another group joined the Anti-Aircraft Experimental Section of the Ministry of Munitions where they worked on ballistics. There were also those who followed a military path, and those who, for reasons of conscience, refused to take an active part in the War. In this talk I’ll discuss the war-time activities of a number of British mathematicians, and examine the impact of the War on their careers as well as on mathematics itself.

PGR Showcase Event: Part II
2021-06-04 14:00 - 15:45 UTC | via Microsoft Teams
The SIAM&IMA Student Chapter is organising a virtual PGR Showcase Event, giving PGR students the opportunity to present their work and ask for input from other PGR students. The virtual event is split into two parts: the first part taking place on the 28th of May (13:00-14:25) and the second on the 4th of June (14:00-15:45).

PGR Showcase Event: Part I
2021-05-28 13:00 - 14:25 UTC | via Microsoft Teams

Convergence Properties of Dynamical Energy Analysis — A Ray-based Method Using Transfer Operators
2021-05-17 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | via Microsoft Teams
Describing the distribution of vibrational energy in real world applications is challenging, especially in the mid-to-high frequency regime. A very promising way is using densities of rays and creating a transfer operator T by a method called Dynamical Energy Analysis. This has been used in a range of real-world scenarios ranging from gear boxes over car bodies to whole ship hulls.

The role of this operator T is to propagate the intensity of the vibrational excitation across a given structure. Using local properties of the structure, this propagation can account for different material properties and geometrical aspects. For thin shells for example, it describes the vibrations in terms of pressure, shear, and bending wave modes.

In order to compare predictions with experimental data this tool has to be used numerically. This makes it necessary to represent T in terms of a finite basis. To have an efficient implementation with a good convergence and small errors it is necessary to choose an optimal set of basis functions. The talk will cover convergence properties of this method as well comparing them with a simple analytical model.

Multiscale and Multiphase Models of Tissue Growth, Remodelling and Mechanics
2021-05-10 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | via Microsoft Teams
Understanding biological tissue growth and mechanics is of fundamental importance to a wide range of diseases and biomedical applications. In this talk I will attempt to summarise (too briefly, probably) an optimistically large set of continuum-mechanical modelling approaches and experimental investigations that aim to shed light on some of these processes in the context of tissue engineering and asthma. The former refers to techniques where tissue is grown in vitro for implantation, or stimulated in vivo at the injury site; the latter is multi-phenotypic disease varying in severity, and underpinned by inflammation, airway contraction, and airway remodelling. The mathematical and computational approaches exploit multiphase modelling, hyperelastic soft tissue mechanics, and asymptotic homogenisation and model reduction approaches, while experimental approaches include with 3D printing, in vitro cell culture, and mechanical testing and image analysis of data from experiments in mice.

Modeling sea-ice for climate research and short-term forcasting
2021-04-29 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/London) | via Microsoft Teams
Abstract

The CICE sea ice model is used extensively by climate and Earth system research groups, and also by operational centers for applications such as numerical weather prediction and guidance for military operations. This presentation introduces the physics represented by large-scale sea-ice models, discusses some of the challenges in applying sea-ice modeling tools developed for research purposes for operational forecasting on short time scales, and highlights promising new directions in sea-ice modeling. The thread running through this discussion relates to the complexity needed to meet common yet distinct sea ice modeling objectives among different communities.

Multiscale Approaches for Heart Perfusion
2021-04-23 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | via Microsoft Teams
Microcirculation and perfusion exemplify the mesoscale in physiological systems, bridging larger and smaller scale phenomena. Multiscale mathematical models represent a valuable tool to investigate and understand such phenomena, where a brute force computational approach is not viable yet. For microcirculation accurate models must comprise both interstitial and vascular compartments, along with their complex morphology. Transport phenomena across the vascular wall couple these two main compartments. In addition, several nonlinear effects are required to properly model microvascular flow.

We apply this framework to human cardiac perfusion, developing a model that accounts for the different length scales of the vessels in the coronary tree. Epicardial vessels are represented with fully three-dimensional (3D) fluid-dynamics, whereas intramural vessels are modeled as a multi-compartment porous medium. The coupling of these models takes place through interface conditions based on the continuity of mass and momentum. To estimate the physical parameters of the multi-compartment model, a virtual intramural vascular network is generated.

Stochastic Modelling for Weather and Climate Prediction
2021-02-01 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | via Microsoft Teams
Atmospheric models used for weather and climate prediction are traditionally formulated in a deterministic manner. In other words, given a particular state of the resolved scale variables, the most likely forcing from the sub-grid scale motion is estimated and used to predict the evolution of the large-scale flow. However, the lack of scale-separation in the atmosphere means that this approach is a large source of error in forecasts. Over the last decade an alternative paradigm has developed: the use of stochastic techniques to represent small-scale processes. These techniques are now ubiquitous in weather and seasonal forecasting centres worldwide. However their formulation remains ad hoc, with little evolution in operational schemes since the earliest approaches. In this presentation I will consider the challenge of developing stochastic parametrisation schemes that skilfully mimic unresolved, small-scale processes, and the potential of very high-resolution simulations to indicate the form that stochastic schemes should take. I will conclude by discussing experiments in two climate models that demonstrate the potential for improving climate simulations by using stochastic approaches.
