The product of a burly scandanavian with a dream of classifying dynamics, lie groups are one of mathematics' great success stories- completely classified and packaged neatly, these elegant structures now find use in a myriad of research areas; from theoretical physics (lying at the heart of Lisi's G.U.T., as well as tacitly in much and most of quantum mechanics) to the classification of differentiable structures on 4-manifolds (famously used by Donaldson to prove that there are infinitely many inequivalent differentiable structures on , despite there being just one topology) to t

The study of Diophantine Equations, that is, equations to which we want to find integer solutions, is one of the oldest and most fruitful areas of number theory. Many famous problems, such as Fermat's Last Theorem or Catalan's Conjecture ("the only two consecutive powers are 8 and 9") are examples of Diophantine equations which have sparked great interest and, in some cases, entire areas of mathematics which have been developed in order to solve them (ring theory and elliptic curves being two notable examples).

Next Monday the WMS is having a social in Top B. There will be lots of frivolous fun, frolics, dangerous drinks mayhem, and hats...

For early birds, we will be up in the grad from 8:30 and heading down to top b at 9. We'll grab some seats upstairs. Come say hi.

UPDATE: This talk has been rescheduled to the following Thursday, the 8th of May.

On August 8th 1900, in what was possibly the most famous lecture in the history of mathematics, the great David Hilbert set a list of 23 open problems that he deemed important enough to set the direction for mathematical research in the 20th century. These problems have all gained a special status in mathematical lore and have gained a great deal of attention during the past 100 years, leading to the resolution of many (though not all) of them.