Postgraduate Seminar
Welcome to the Postgraduate Seminar! This is a weekly seminar for PhD students to give talks to their peers in a relaxed setting. The talks may be about topics that our PhDs are focused on or just on something mathematical we find interesting. As well as helping students to gain vital experience in giving talks, these seminars are designed to build a sense of community amongst the PhD students. We therefore favour talks that are not too specialised and which are pitched at a broad mathematical audience.
The organisers for the postgraduate seminar in 2026-27 are Owen Jones and Yaoqi Yang. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in giving a talk.
Lunch is provided for attendees of the seminar each week in the Common Room immediately after the talk. Speakers may contact the organisers to request specific items for lunch.
Time: Wednesdays in term time, 12pm-1pm
Location: B3.02, Zeeman Building
Week 1 (7 October 2026)
Toby Cole - Exploring instabilities in fluid dynamics
Week 2 (14 October 2026)
Luca Bollini - Fourier- based Metrics
Most endeavours to solve PDE problems benefit from having a complete metric space in which to search for solutions. When working with probability measures, those of you acquainted with the Wasserstein distance know of at least one class of such metric spaces. However, some contexts prefer a different approach. In this talk, I will introduce Fourier-based metrics, and their corresponding complete metric spaces of probability measures. I will also outline a few contexts in which these spaces are advantageous, without exploring too many details. I intend for this talk be accessible to everyone, and there may even be a spot of live music…
Week 3 (21 October 2026)
Rose Bedell
Week 4 (28 October 2026)
Chiara Molinari
Week 5 (4 November 2026)
Kian Lush Link opens in a new window- An Introduciton to Rational Equivariant Stable Homotopy Theory
The talk be focused on overarching ideas rather than technical details, so no background in topology will be required, and even a passing familiarity with groups should be sufficient.
Week 6 (11 November 2026)
Mak PeharLink opens in a new window
Week 7 (18 November 2026)
Joshua Reynolds - Sphere graphs and their automorphisms
Ivanov’s metaconjecture predicts that any “rich enough” structure associated to a surface will derive its symmetries from the homeomorphisms of said surface. A recent result of Georgakopoulos showed that the intersection graph of all chords of the circle has automorphism group coinciding with that of the circle; this graph is clearly “rich enough” to encode the symmetries of the circle.
In this talk I will present several results from my master’s dissertation, as well as a rough idea of the methodology behind them. In particular, is the intersection graph of chords for higher-dimensional spheres rich enough to encode all homeomorphisms? We will see that the answer is no, and that we obtain a strictly smaller group instead. I will then introduce an alternative graph which allows us to recover the desired result for the 2-sphere.
The talk will contain some technical details but should be accessible to all.