Past Events

The UBC Department of Computer Science is delighted to host this special event with Donald E. Knuth, one of the most influential pioneers in computer science. His multivolume work “The Art of Computer Programming” is regarded as one of the seminal...

The slides for this event are available on mathtube.org. As the Euler theory of hydrodynamics (1757), the Born-Infeld theory of electromagnetism (1934) enjoys a simple and beautiful geometric structure. Quite surprisingly, the BI model which is of...

Wavelets provide a mathematical tool that emerged in the 1980s from a synthesis of ideas in mathematics, physics, computer science and engineering. They are now used in a wide range of mathematical applications, and provide a mathematical way to...

Motivated by a mounting tide of drug resistant bacteria, the search for new antibacterial agents is embracing technologies that lie outside traditional bounds. One promising source of compounds is the lysins encoded by bacteriophages (viruses that...

In this talk, we will highlight the importance of measurement, and discuss what can and cannot be measured. Focusing on the measurement of position, importance, and shape, we will illustrate by discussing the mathematics behind GPS, Google and laser...

Climate change has the potential to affect all of our lives. But is it really happening, and what has maths got to do with it? In this talk I will take a light hearted view of the many issues concerned with predicting climate change and how...

The classical problem of Diophantine equations is to solve polynomial equations over the rationals. More generally, we may consider solutions over an extension of the rationals. If the equations define an elliptic curve (or more generally, an Abelian...

The classical problem of Diophantine equations is to solve polynomial equations over the rationals. More generally, we may consider solutions over an extension of the rationals. If the equations define an elliptic curve (or more generally, an Abelian...

Let A denote the algebra of all linear operators on a complex vector space V—mostly finite-dimensional for the purposes of this talk. Let G be an irreducible group or semigroup contained in A. (This means that there is no subspace of V other than {0}...