Many large scale physical properties such as the "roughness" of a piece of sandpaper or the resilience of a sheet of metal depend upon the small scale properties of the medium e.g. atomic arrangement or the presence of defects in the medium. Intuitively, a piece of sandpaper feels "rough" and presents frictional resistance when an object moves across it because it has an uneven ("wiggly") surface.

Anyone who has gone near GCSE chemistry knows that an atom is made up of a nucleus (built out of protons and neutrons) surrounded by an electron cloud. Early quantum mechanics showed us that the electrons are only allowed to take certain quantized energy states, sharing, swapping and taking from other atoms to minimise the overall energy, forming compounds and ions.

But what are the subtleties of this process? How do we determine the 'shape' of these energy states, the so-called orbitals?

PDEs are strange, often impenetrable things, just proving that a solution exists represents a far from trivial task; and any piece of information, however small, can shed invaluable light on the problems they represent. Many techniques exist to help analyze and decode this information, and all find a place in modern mathematics: one such technique appeals to a property of some of the most fundamental objects in mathematics- graphs.

Of all the techniques used to classify topological spaces, few are so simple, so fruitful and so ubiquitous as homology and its dual, cohomology. By breaking a space into discretized parts we spot patterns, monitoring the closed n-dimensional "loops" to give groups, smaller structures that elucidate the whole; yielding vital theorems that, with a little case analysis, can classify the almost indeterminably abstract.

Location: B0.13
Those amazing people, the WMS are having a meeting (read: lots of interesting discussion) about what's happening and what's hot with The Society. Also, they'll be planning the future of The Society, and you're more than welcome to come along, and help decide that future.

Agendas and more details to follow... (suits and ties optional)

I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
-G.H. Hardy on Ramanujan

Just a little note to say that the mathsest cafe in all the world continues this week...

Food.

Help.

Joy.

Undergrad workroom wednesdays 2pm-4pm.

Possibly the greatest unsung triumph in mathematics is the classification of the finite simple groups, put together by literally hundreds of mathematicians over the last century. Simple groups are the "building blocks" of symmetry, and the classification throws up 26 oddities, including the infamous "Monster Group".

The proof - spread over some 10000 pages of journal articles - uses some quite impenetrable specialised techniques. But we can get a flavour of it just by looking at some of the simplest cases, using the work of Lagrange, Sylow, Lie, Poincaré and many others.

In this talk Owen Daniel will actively seek to join together two fields of interest: recreational mathematics, and magic. Owen has been recognised by the Magic Circle as the two time winner of the Blanchard Trophy, and was placed 3rd in their 'Junior Close Up Magician of the Year' competition, at the age of only 15.

It's happening again. More maths help, more cake, tea, coffee, banter, joy, magic etc.

Join our crack team of helpers this wednesday 2-4 in the undergad common room.

The language of categories and functors is not only an indispensable tool in many areas of high-level mathematics, but is itself an incredibly interesting subject, worthy of study in its own right.

Based on notions developed in the 1940s by Mac Lane and Eilenberg, category theory (or "generalised abstract nonsense" as it is sometimes known) attempts to unify mathematics by describing similar structures through the subject in terms of "objects" and "arrows".

First years of beleaguered matlab mourning-end your upset now.

WMS, your favourite society, are running our own very special informal help sessions for you, just because you asked us to.

Crash courses, which can be requested here are our by request talks on any areas you find (after the best efforts of your lecturer) you still don't understand.

Matlab, that most baffling and utterly un-user-friendly of things is first on the slab. We kick off with an informal talk on the heuristics of the subject (led by Jamie Sawyer MS04 3pm-about 4pm this Friday), and we'll be booking extra support from there. The dream is: smaller class, more contact, less intimidation. Questions aplenty can and should be asked.

See y'all there.