The Archimedeans

It is my pleasure to invite you to this friday's talk by Prof Victoria Gould, who will be talking about semi-groups and associativity. Details for the talk are below.
When: 19:00, Friday 3rd May Where: Room MR2, CMS Who: Prof Victoria Gould... Title: The Joy of Associativity Abstract: From our very first encounters with arithmetic, almost any operation we come across in mathematics is associative. Semigroup Theory provides the framework to study associativity, and reaches into many different areas of mathematics - classical algebra, formal languages, C ∗ -algebras, tropical algebra, decision problems and model theory, to name a few. I will introduce the audience to the topic of algebraic semigroup theory, some of its applications, and then the beautiful theory of biordered sets and their so-called free idempotent generated semigroups (FIGs). Groups are special semigroups (!) and each group possesses but one idempotent. A mystery still revealing itself is the tight correspondence between groups, biordered sets and FIGs. This talk will not assume any specialist knowledge.

We welcome you all to join us for dinner in Castle Inn afterwards! It's a great opportunity to socialize with other audience members, as well as a chance to talk more with our speaker. If you'd like to join us, please sign up by following this link: https://forms.gle/xTpWPvNhJd9N16nK6
Entry to the talk is free for members and £2 for non-members. You can sign up for membership on the door, with life membership only £10! Snacks and refreshments will be available
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Stressed out by CATAM and revision? Need a Break? Come to the CMS for some (very reasonably priced) Pizza and Board Games fun with the Archimedeans! We will have a variety of board games arranged but feel welcome to bring your own.
When: 6:30pm, Thursday May 2 Where: CMS Core... Details: cost £3 for members, £5 for non-members There will be vegetarian pizzas but if you have any further dietary requirements please contact us.
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Our first speaker of the term will be Dr Paul Russell, who will be talking about graph theory and Amalgamation. Details for the talk are below.
When: 19:00, Friday 26th April Where: Room MR2, CMS Who: Dr. Paul Russell... Title: Amalgamation Abstract: Paul Erdos proved that there exist graphs with no short cycles requiring arbitrary many colours to colour their vertices so that no two adjacent vertices have the same colour. Unfortunately, the proof does not explicitly construct such graphs. A well known example sheet problem asks for an example in the simplest case, where we ban triangles---cycles of length 3. Such examples seem hard to find, and tend to contain many cycles of length 4. I shall discuss a solution to this problem by Nesetril and Rodl using their method of "amalgamation" which, while it is more complicated than other solutions, also allows us to ban longer cycles (and can do much more besides). No prior knowledge of graph theory is required.

We welcome you all to join us for dinner in La Margherita afterwards! It's a great opportunity to socialise with other audience members, as well as a chance to talk more with our speaker. If you'd like to join us, please sign up by following this link: http://bit.do/eQpcr
Entry to the talk is free for members and £2 for non-members. You can sign up for membership on the door, with life membership only £10! Snacks and refreshments will be available
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It's the time of the year where we elect a new committee, we welcome you to attend our AGM where we'll vote a new committee and enjoy some pizza in the process. If you're interested in applying then please see below.
The roles open for election are -President -Vice-President... -Treasurer -External Secretary -Internal Secretary -Events Manager -Sponsorship Officer -Publicity Officer -Webmaster
If you'd like to apply then please email the committee at archim-committee@srcf.net. The deadline for applications is 17:30 on Monday 11th March.
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Our next speaker of the term will be Dr Andrew Duncan, who will be talking about Thompson's groups and some of the places where they appear.
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Title: Thompson's chameleons: F, V, T... Where: MR2, CMS Speaker: Dr. Andrew Duncan Abstract: While working on problems in logic in the 1960's, Richard J. Thompson discovered a family of groups, now called F, T and V, which have simple definitions and give rise to many examples as well as tantalising problems. The groups were subsequently found to occur in several other guises: in work on infinite simple groups, homotopy and shape theory, group co-homology, dynamical systems, knot theory and analysis, and have been generalised in several different ways.
I will describe F,T and V, in a few different ways, outline some important features and describe one way in which they arise as dynamical systems.
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We welcome you all to join us for dinner in Nivedyam afterwards! It's a great opportunity to socialise with other audience members, as well as a chance to talk more with our speaker. The signup can be found here: https://goo.gl/forms/0HqCG9ViyJ108rMC3
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Entry to the talk is free for members and £2 for non-members. You can sign up for membership on the door, with life membership only £10! Snacks and refreshments will be available.
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Our first ever undergrad talks evening will be taking place on Monday in MR5. There will be six speakers as well as a pizza break. The first three talks are meant to be more accessible while the last three as more technical. Attendees are welcome to attend only part of the event. Attendance is free and pizza is £3 for non-speakers. Details for the talks are below.
18.00—Jeremy Taylor | Closed Curves in the Plane
Abstract: There are various quantities associated to a closed cu...
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Our next speaker of the term will be Dr Alessia Annibale, who will be talking about the role of neural networks and graph theory in cell biology..
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Full Title: Modelling cellular gene expression via neural networks and bipartite graphs... Where: MR2, CMS Speaker: Dr. Alessia Annibale Abstract: Cell differentiation is one of the most fascinating areas of developmental biology. This was long thought to be an irreversible process, however it has been shown recently that it is possible to reprogramme fully differentiated cells into a state of induced pluripotency, which strongly resembles embryonic stem cells, via the introduction of a few transcription factors. This opens up exciting perspectives in the field of regenerative medicine, however, no universally accepted theory exists that explains the phenomena. The purpose of this work is to drive forward our understanding of cell reprogramming by introducing an analytical model for transitions between cell types. Inspired by neural networks theory, we model cell types as hierarchically organized dynamical attractors corresponding to cell cycles. Stages of the cell cycle are fully characterised by the configuration of gene expression levels, and reprogramming corresponds to triggering transitions between such configurations. Two mechanisms were found for reprogramming: cycle-state specific perturbations and a noise-induced switching. The former corresponds to a directed perturbation that induces a transition into a cycle-state of a different cell type in the potency hierarchy (e.g. a stem cell) whilst the latter is a priori undirected and could be induced, e.g. by a (stochastic) change in the cellular environment. In addition, the mechanism for the effective interactions arising between genes, is studied by means of a bipartite graph model, that integrates the genome and transcriptome into a single regulatory network. With this perspective, we are able to deduce important features of the regulatory network that exists in every cell type.
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We welcome you all to join us for dinner in The Punter afterwards! It's a great opportunity to socialise with other audience members, as well as a chance to talk more with our speaker. The signup can be found here: https://goo.gl/forms/GwmIkR3veuY7g7jd2
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Entry to the talk is free for members and £2 for non-members. You can sign up for membership on the door, with life membership only £10! Snacks and refreshments will be available.
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The Archimedeans are proud to announce that the annual dinner will be taking place on Tuesday the 5th of March. This is our largest social event of the year and definitely not one to be missed. It doesn't matter if you haven't attended all of our talks - everyone is invited!
The dinner will be held at DoubleTree by Hilton and will consist of a drinks reception followed by a three course meal. Wine will be served with the meal. All attendees are free to invite a member of the maths faculty as an honourary guest. So feel free to invite your favourite supervisors, lecturers and other faculty members. The dress code is black tie and tickets will be £15 for members and £20 for non-members.
Tickets can be bought here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-archim edeans-annual-dinn…

our next speaker of the term will be Dr James Newton, who will be talking about Monsky's theorem and distance functions.
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Title: Dividing Squares Into Triangles... Where: MR2, CMS Speaker: Dr James Netwon Abstract: I will talk about Monsky's theorem, which says that a square cannot be divided into an odd number of triangles of equal area. The proof involves a weird (but fun) application of a non-archimedean distance function on the rational numbers; I'll spend some portion of the talk explaining what non-archimedean distance functions are and why they are as important (from some points of view) as the usual notion of distance between two numbers.
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We welcome you all to join us for dinner in La Margherita afterwards! It's a great opportunity to socialise with other audience members, as well as a chance to talk more with our speaker. The signup can be found here: https://goo.gl/forms/tOj0f0mqWqAAh2ot1
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Entry to the talk is free for members and £2 for non-members. You can sign up for membership on the door, with life membership only £10! Snacks and refreshments will be available.
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Our first speaker this term is Ana Khukro, who will be talking about groups and some of their unexpected uses.
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Title: The Geometry of Groups... Where: MR2, CMS Speaker: Dr Ana Khukro Abstract: Groups are extremely natural algebraic objects, allowing us to express the notion of symmetry in a mathematical language. While they can be studied in a purely algebraic or combinatorial way, groups truly come alive when imbued with geometry. We will talk about how to construct graphs from groups, the interactions between geometric and algebraic properties of groups, and some surprising applications, including how group theory can help you save money on cables.
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We welcome you all to join us for dinner in Nivedyam afterwards! It's a great opportunity to socialise with other audience members, as well as a chance to talk more with our speaker. A signup can be found here: https://goo.gl/forms/ubev2ucNAidfU1gU2.