Information for current students and staff

Maths Week Scotland
As well as various other events as mentioned throughout this newsletter, during Maths Week Scotland Prof Tara Brendle, Prof Ian Strachan and Dr Andrew Wilson all attended a reception with the Deputy First Minister John Swinney. The reception was held at a venue in Edinburgh to celebrate Maths Week Scotland.

Dr Misha Feigin gave talks at a number of international conferences during the summer of 2018. The first was “Integrable Systems and Applications” at the Centre for Geometry and Physics in Pohang, South Korea in May. The talk “Matroids, reflection groups and free hyperplane arrangements” followed in June at the RIMS, Kyoto, Japan. Dr Feigin also gave the plenary talk “Geometric Methods in Physics” in Bialowieza, Poland, in July. In August, Dr Feigin visited Dubna, Russia to give the talk “Supersymmetry in Integrable Systems”, where his shared PhD student, Georgios Antoniou, also gave a talk. Later in August and still in Russia, but this time in Moscow, was the talk “Topological Field Theories, String Theory and Matrix Models -2018”. Dr Feigin gave his last talk of the summer at Dynamics Days Europe in Loughborough, UK, in September, where Prof Ian Strachan also gave a talk

In June, Dr David MacTaggart organized a summer school at the International Centre of Mechanical Sciences (CISM) in Udine (Italy) entitled “Advanced Topics in MHD”. The school consisted of lectures given by a team of international researchers, covering topics such as MHD stability theory, magnetic relaxation, magnetic topology and turbulent reconnection. The students came from all over the world, including Europe, Russia, China and Japan. Dr MacTaggart is currently editing a book based on the lectures of the summer school, which will be published by Springer.

Also in June, Dr Surajit Ray was one of the plenary speakers at SINAPSE (Scottish Imaging Network) meeting and an invited speaker at “Advances in finite mixture and other non-regular models” in the beautiful city of Guilin, China in mid-August.

Prof Ray Ogden gave a Plenary Lecture entitled “Fibre dispersion moderated elasticity of soft biological tissues” at the European Solid Mechanics Conference in Bologna on 3rd July, and a Keynote Lecture entitled “Elasticity models for dispersion in fibrous soft biological tissues” at the World Conference of Biomechanics in Dublin on 9th July. Ray also co-organized a Summer School on “Biomechanics, from protein to tissue to organ: modeling and computation” from 3rd to 7th September in Graz, Austria.

Dr Alex Bartel was, during the summer 2018, twice in North America. The first time was in July for a one week stay in Quebec City, as an invited speaker at the bi-annual meeting of the Canadian Number Theory Association. There were some exotic animals on campus from that visit. The second time was to attend an absolutely fantastic one week workshop at MIT.

Dr Amira El Ayouty, Dr Mengyi Gong and Mr Craig Wilkie and attended and presented their work at the International Workshop on Statistical Modelling conference in Bristol in July 2018.

In August, Dr Chris Athorne spoke at a conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on “Algebraic curves, Integrable Systems and Cryptography,” which brought together two groups of hitherto disparate researchers in search of common ground. The meeting coincided with the Independence Day celebrations hence the tanks near Maidan Square.

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First published: 5 October 2018