International Women's Day

Below you can find some of our previous International Women's Day events:

International Women's Day Talk 2025, Prof. Diane Maclagan, University of Warwick

Wednesday 19 March, 2pm in the Scott Logic Lecture Theatre, followed by a drinks reception.

Tropical Geometry

Tropical geometry is geometry over the "tropical semiring", where addition is minimum, and multiplication is addition (so 1+1=1!).  It is combinatorial shadow of algebraic geometry that replaces varieties with objects from polyhedral geometry and related combinatorics. In this talk I will introduce this area, and describe some of the applications, without assuming any words from the previous sentence.

International Women's Day Talk 2024, Prof Tara Brendle, Glasgow University

Wednesday 28 February, 2pm in the Scott Logic Lecture Theatre, followed by a drinks reception.

Symmetries of surfaces

The mapping class group of a surface is its group of symmetries.  In the 1930s, Dehn demonstrated that this inherently topological object could also be understood from a purely algebraic viewpoint.  Much later, in the 1980s, N. Ivanov proved that the mapping class group could also be encoded via a combinatorial object known as the curve graph.  In this talk we will describe these groups and a “metaconjecture” about them due to Ivanov.  We will also explain work with Margalit that reveals how Ivanov-type combinatorial models can tell us about the algebraic structure of mapping class groups.

International Women's Day Talk 2023, Prof Nilanjana Datta, University of Cambridge

Thursday 4 May 2pm in the Scott Logic Lecture Theatre, followed by a drinks reception.

Entropy - ubiquitous, enigmatic and essential

Entropy, a word familiar to many of us, plays a fundamental role in several branches of science, including thermodynamics, statistical physics, information theory, cosmology and chemistry. It is also used in fields as diverse as art, religion, economics and literature. In the exciting and fast-developing field of quantum information theory, there are a plethora of different entropies. They arise naturally in the study of quantum analogues of familiar and essential tasks, e.g. the compression of digital images for efficient storage, the reliable transmission of messages over a crackling telephone line etc. In this lecture, I will give an overview of entropy in some of its many guises, focussing in particular on those which are relevant to classical and quantum information theory.

Please click here to watch. a recording of Prof Datta's talk.

International Women's Day Talk 2022, Prof Bethany Marsh, University of Leeds

Wednesday 9 March, 2pm online and in the Scott Logic Lecture Theatre, 

Breaking the Bias

Conway-Coxeter frieze patterns are arrangements of positive integers in an infinite strip in the plane satisfying certain combinatorial rules. The talk will include an introduction to frieze patterns and the relationship with cluster algebras, a widely-studied family of commutative algebras introduced by Fomin and Zelevinsky in 2001. I will also discuss some of my experiences as a trans woman in mathematics.

Please click here to watch a recording of Prof Marsh's talk.