Statistics, Probability, Analysis and Applied Mathematics (SPAAM)

SPAAM Seminar Series 2025/26

The Statistics, Probability, Analysis and Applied Mathematics (SPAAM) seminar series will take place on Thursdays between 3-4pm in room B3.02 and virtually on the SPAAM Microsoft Teams ChannelLink opens in a new window during term time. It will host a variety of talks from PhD students involved in applied mathematics research at Warwick and invited guests from other institutions (see below for the schedule and talk abstracts).

The seminars will usually host two speakers (unless otherwise stated) with each talk taking around 15-20 minutes with 5-10 minutes of questions afterwards. Speakers and committee members will hang around after the talks for social tea/coffee (and cakes!) and further questions.

This seminar series is hosted by the Warwick SIAM-IMA Student ChapterLink opens in a new window. Please do contact one of the committee members if you would like to join and be added to the MS Teams channel. Note that these talks may be recorded so do join with audio and video off if you don't wish to feature!

If you missed the seminar, head over to our YouTube channelLink opens in a new window to find the recorded talks!

If you would like to give a talk this academic year, please contact one of our seminar organisers:

Sasha Glendinning ( )

Zeynep Tunalioglu ( )

and we will find you a slot!

Find out more about the
Warwick SIAM-IMA Student Chapter

Term 1

Date	Talk 1	Talk 2
16th October (Week 2)	Eva Zaat	Ruibo Kou
23rd October 2024 (Week 3)	Chess Tournament Social
30th October 2024 (Week 4)	Jiayao Shao	Matthew Adeoye
6th Nov 2024 (Week 5)	Freddie Jensen	Marc Truter
13th November 2024 (Week 6)	Ziyang Liu	Usman Ladan
20th November 2024 (Week 7)	Hefin Lambley	Sam Turley
27th November 2024 (Week 8)	Andrew Nugent	Ramon Nartallo-Kaluarachchi
4th December 2024 (Week 9)	Mario Kart Social
11th December 2024 (Week 10)	Grega Saksida	Shreya Sinha Roy

Term 1 Abstracts

Week 2.

Eva Zaat (Warwick Mathematics Institute) | Making Maths 'Easier'

Maths isn't always easy, but sometimes it is harder than it needs to be. In this talk we will discuss some practical strategies to make maths communication and problem solving more accessible for everyone. We will start with how mathematicians solve their problems, before exploring how maths anxiety, neurodivergence and (other) disabilities can impact how we engage with maths. By understanding these different experiences better, we can support ourselves, our collaborators, our audiences and our students; reduce barriers to learning maths and create more inclusive maths spaces.

Ruibo Kou (Warwick Mathematics Institute) | The Stochastic Casimir Effect

We model the one-dimensional ‘classical’ vacuum by a system of annihilating Brownian motions on R with pairwise immigration. A pair of reflecting or absorbing walls placed in such a vacuum at separation L experiences an attractive force which decays exponentially with L. This phenomenon can be regarded as a purely classical Casimir effect for a system of interacting Brownian motions.

Week 4.

Jiayao Shao (Warwick Mathematics Institute) | Stochastic Dynamical System Methods applied to ship capsize problem

Stochastic dynamical systems allow modelling of transitions induced by disturbances, in particular from an attracting equilibrium and crossing the stable manifold of a saddle. In the small-noise limit, the probability of such transitions is governed by a large deviation principle. We illustrate a computational approach—the Method of Division—for approximating rare transition events, including their most likely paths, transition rates, and associated probabilities. To cater for realistic applications, we allow unbounded time, coloured and degenerate forcing. Its effectiveness is demonstrated via a ship capsize model.

Matthew Adeoye (Warwick Department of Statistics) | Bayesian spatio-temporal modelling for infectious disease outbreak detection

Surveillance of infectious diseases across multiple regions often requires the use of spatio-temporal models to characterize transmission dynamics and detect outbreaks. However, these models can suffer from high computational costs, parameter identifiability issues, and difficulties in comparing alternative model structures. In this talk, I will present a general and scalable Bayesian methodology that addresses these challenges, providing efficient posterior inference and a robust model comparison technique to approximate model evidence in high-dimensional space. To conclude, I will present some results from application to both simulated and real-world datasets.

Week 5.

Freddie Jensen (Warwick Mathematics Institute) | Observations from modelling nonlinear acoustics in brass instruments

We discuss interesting features of a recently-developed model which combines weak nonlinearity and complex geometry in duct acoustics without flow, with applications to sound in brass instruments. Topics discussed here include curvature-induced plane-wave tunnelling, a method of quantifying the speed of sound around bends, an ambiguity around forward/backward decomposition, and a new test case in the study of nodes and turning points.

Marc Truter (Warwick Mathematics Institute) | Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Build a Periodic Table of Shapes

In this talk we show how deep reinforcement learning can be used to overcome the computational challenges faced by conventional search algorithms in the discovery of new Fano hypersurfaces. Varieties are the core objects of study in algebraic geometry, they are the geometric shapes defined by the solutions to polynomial equations. An ‘atomic’ and important class of these are called Fano varieties. Periodic tables of them are known in dimensions 1 and 2, and partially known in dimension 3. The goal of my project is to help build a periodic table in dimension 4.