Professor Martin Hairer to deliver the 2018 Terry Wall Lecture
The 2018 Terry Wall lecture will be delivered by Professor Martin Hairer on “Taming Infinities”.
The lecture will take place on Friday 19th October at 4:00pm in the Rotblat Lecture Theatre in the Chadwick Building. (Building #207 on the University campus map).
Refreshments will be available before the lecture from 3:30pm and there will be a wine reception following the lecture.
Please find additional information below, and on the lecture poster.
Abstract: Some physical and mathematical theories have the unfortunate feature that if one takes them at face value, many quantities of interest appear to be infinite! What's worse, this doesn't just happen for some exotic theories, but in the standard theories describing some of the most fundamental aspects of nature. Various techniques, usually going under the common name of “renormalisation” have been developed over the years to address this, allowing mathematicians and physicists to tame these infinities. We will tip our toes into some of the conceptual and mathematical aspects of these techniques and we will see how they have recently been used to study equations whose meaning was not even clear until now.
About the Terry Wall Lecture
The Terry Wall Lecture is an annual lecture on a topic in Pure Mathematics (broadly construed) by an internationally distinguished speaker. The lecture is named in honour of Professor Terry Wall FRS, Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Liverpool from 1965 until his retirement in 1999. During this time he served terms as Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics and as President of the London Mathematical Society. His research has been recognised by a number of prestigious awards and honours, including the Senior Whitehead Prize and the Pólya Prize of the LMS, the Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society, and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Professor Terry Wall FRS
About the speaker
Professor Martin Hairer received his PhD in 2001 from the University of Geneva under the direction of Jean-Pierre Eckmann, after a BSc in Mathematics (1998) and an MSc in Physics (1998) at the same University. Before his current appointment at Imperial College London, he held positions at Warwick and at the Courant Institute (New York). Among many other honours, he was awarded the Whitehead prize in 2008, he became fellow of the Royal Society in 2014, and in the same year he was awarded the Fields medal, which is broadly considered the highest recognition for a mathematician.
Professor Hairer has worked in the areas of probability, real and stochastic analysis. His Fields medal award reads "for his outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations, and in particular for the creation of a theory of regularity structures for such equations".