Juliette Hell: Bianchi models and the chaotic birth of the universe

We are happy to announce the next talk of our BMS Women in Mathematics Lecture Series:

Julitte Hell (FU Berlin) will give a talk on “Bianchi models and the chaotic birth of the universe”.

When: 4:00pm on Wednesday, 29th of May, 2013                                                               Where: FU Berlin, SR 025/026, Arnimallee 6, 14195 Berlin

There will be tea and cookies after the talk.

————————————————————————————————————————- abstract:

Bianchi class models are systems of ordinary differential equations derived from the Einstein equations under certain symmetry assumptions. They are the simplest models describing a spatially homogeneous anisotropic universe as it evolves, in backward time direction, toward the big-bang singularity. It has been conjectured by Belinsky, Khalatnikov and Lifshitz that a big-bang singularity generically happens in a chaotic oscillatory manner. We will see how this behaviour shows up in Bianchi models, what recent results have been obtained and what mathematical challenges remain open.                                                                                           

Juliette Hell studied mathematics at the FU Berlin and completed her PhD thesis on “Conley Index at Infinity” in 2009. Currently, she holds a postdoctoral position in the SFB “Space, Time, Matter”. Her research is about space-time singularities and more generally about dynamics at infinity.

————————————————————————————————————————- What’s the idea and why are we doing this?

Many young women go through their entire university career without ever being taught by a single female professor. That’s why we, a group of young mathematicians in Berlin, came up with the idea of creating a lecture series where female professors and junior faculty would speak
about their research and the kind of mathematics they do. The goal of these lectures is to enable the meeting of aspiring mathematicians with successful female mathematicians. The series will thus provide new role models to young women, role models that they can more easily identify with and whose success they can emulate. Moreover, these talks will be a great occasion for everybody to hear introductory talks to the cutting-edge research that is happening right now in Berlin and elsewhere.

If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

I would like to draw your attention to this article.
If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

I particularly like part 4.

Barbara Baumeister: From finite simple groups to Kac-Moody

We are happy to announce the fourth talk of our BMS Women in Mathematics Lecture Series:

Barbara Baumeister will speak about “From finite simple groups to Kac-Moody”.

When: 16:15 on Tuesday, 29th of January, 2013.
Where: FU Berlin, R140, Arnimallee 7, 14195 Berlin

Tea and Cookies will be served after the lecture.

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abstract:

Almost 150 years ago Sophus Lie introduced continuous transformation groups, the Lie groups, which were helpful in the study of differential equations. At about the same time Emilie Mathieu found the first five sporadic groups. In a gigantic proof it has been shown that the finite simple groups are the alternating groups; the finite versions of the Lie groups, obtained as automorphism groups of semi simple Lie algebras by Claude Chevalley; as well as their twisted analogous and the five Mathieu groups together with 21 more sporadic groups. Major tools in studying these groups are, besides local group theory, also geometric methods. Independently Kac and Moody generalized the semi simple Lie algebras to infinite dimensional Kac Moody algebras. These together with the Kac Moody groups defined by Jacques Tits play an important role in mathematics as well as in physics.

In her talk, Barbara Baumeister will present old and new material on these groups, as well as recent results on the geometric methods used to study them.

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What’s the idea and why are we doing this?

Many young women go through their entire university career without ever
being taught by a single female professor. That’s why we, a group of
young mathematicians in Berlin, came up with the idea of creating a
lecture series where female professors and junior faculty would speak
about their research and the kind of mathematics they do. The goal of
these lectures is to enable the meeting of aspiring mathematicians with
successful female mathematicians. The series will thus provide new role
models to young women, role models that they can more easily identify with
and whose success they can emulate. Moreover, these
talks will be a great occasion for everybody to hear introductory
talks to the cutting-edge research that is happening in
Berlin and elsewhere.

Anna von Pippich: Eisenstein Series

We are happy to announce the third talk of our BMS Women in Mathematics Lecture Series:

Anna von Pippich will talk about “Eisenstein Series”.

When: 5:15 pm on Tuesday, 20th of November, 2012.
Where: HU Berlin, 1.023, Rudower Chaussee 25, 12489 Berlin

There will be tea and cookies after the talk.

———————————————————————–
abstract:

A well-known theorem of Lagrange states that every natu-
ral number n can be represented as the sum of four integer
squares. The total number of such representations is given
by an explicit formula in terms of the divisors of n. The
proof of this formula is carried out by means of Eisenstein
series, which are generalizations of periodic functions and
encode interesting arithmetic information in their Fourier
coefficients.
Nowadays, manifold types of Eisenstein series arise in
mathematics with numerous applications to number the-
ory and arithmetic geometry. In this talk, we first introdu-
ce and highlight the classical Eisenstein series. Then, we
investigate Eisenstein series which are associated to special
points on hyperbolic Riemann surfaces. We employ these
series to construct a metric for the moduli space of hyper-
bolic Riemann surfaces of genus g with marked points and
we will discover their relation to an arithmetic Riemann-
Roch isometry.

Anna von Pippich studied mathematics and philosophy in
Leipzig, Paris and Berlin. In 2010, she completed her PhD on
“The arithmetic of elliptic Eisenstein series”. After research
stays in Zürich, Basel and Berlin, she is currently a substi-
tute professor at the mathematical institute of the Georg-
August University Göttingen.

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What’s the idea and why are we doing this?

Many young women go through their entire university career without ever
being taught by a single female professor. That’s why we, a group of
young mathematicians in Berlin, came up with the idea of creating a
lecture series where female professors and junior faculty would speak
about their research and the kind of mathematics they do. The goal of
these lectures is to enable the meeting of aspiring mathematicians with
successful female mathematicians. The series will thus provide new role
models to young women, role models that they can more easily identify with
and whose success they can emulate. Moreover, these
talks will be a great occasion for everybody to hear introductory
talks to the cutting-edge research that is happening right now in
Berlin and elsewhere.

EWM Conference 2012

We would like to draw your attention to the conference of the German Chapter of the European Women in Mathematics which will take place on November 1-2, 2012, at the University of Bielefeld.

Invited speakers are:

Nina Gantert (Technische Universität München)
“Random walks on percolation clusters”

Caroline Lasser (Technische Universität München)
“Semiclassics from a computational point of view”

Sarah Rees (University of Newcastle)
“When Artin groups are sufficiently large …”

Katrin Tent (Universität Münster)
“Tits, Urysohn, Rado: simple groups on homogeneous structures”

Everyone is welcome to participate.

A limited number of slots for contributed talks will be available and a poster session is planned, both for female scientists. Proposals for contributions should be submitted by 1 October 2012.

EWM Conference 2012 official webpage

Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students

We found this interesting article last week in PNAS:

Abstract

Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

Here you can read the article. We would be interested in your comments.

Seen in Paris Metro

Discoveries

Guest post by Mimi

I began the research phase of my math PhD last winter. Until then, I
was still taking courses and studying for exams. Finally I can focus
on topics and reading material that I want to look into, not to answer
homework questions, but to answer questions I’ve come up with myself.
Or so I thought.

I made an incredible discovery rather early in my research career. It
lead to quite a large project on which I’ve only just begun to make
serious strides. In February last year, I learned that I was
pregnant. And on October 12, I gave birth to a very healthy, very
large 4.3 kg baby girl.

Babies are difficult. At least my baby is difficult. She has the most
powerful heartbreaking cry. The nurses in the hospital agreed that she
has the loudest cry in our ward. The absolute exhaustion that follows
5 hours of nonstop crying makes the 20 straight hours of studying just
a few months ago seem like a cakewalk.

It is amazing to see how quickly a baby develops. Everyday she makes a
new discovery. My favorite look on my daughter is when her eyes are
wide open staring intensely at some object with a look of such
beautiful wonder. I hope that she will forever make new discoveries
with the same degree of amazement.

And I hope the same for myself. This is the reason I went into
research to begin with. The pure joy of discovery. Over the next
weeks, months and years, my baby will continue to make many new
discoveries. Here’s hoping that my discoveries will lead to a decent
dissertation before she’s old enough to start daycare.

Verena Bögelein: Global Lipschitz regularity of the parabolic p-Laplacian system

We are happy to announce the third talk of our BMS Women in Mathematics Lecture Series:

Verena Bögelein will talk about
“Global Lipschitz regularity of the parabolic
p-Laplacian system”.

When: 2:30 pm on Friday, 27th of January, 2012.
Where: TU Berlin, MA 004, Straße des 17. Juni 136, 10623 Berlin

There’ll be tea and cookies after the talk.
And here is the official poster.

———————————————————————–
abstract:

Partial differential equations involving a degenerate diffusion part
have been of huge interest for mathematicians and also other natural
scientists for a long time. The most prominent models for this
kind of PDEs are the elliptic and parabolic p-Laplacian equation,
respectively system. They naturally arise in geometry, quasiconformal
mappings, fluid dynamics and image restoration. Apart from
applications these problems are also of huge mathematical interest
because of their particular structure. The question for regularity of
solutions was a longstanding open problem. Even up to now there
are still unsolved problems. The first breakthrough was achieved by
Ural‘tseva in 1968 who proved local C1,α regularity for solutions of
the elliptic p-Laplacian equation. The analogous result for the elliptic
p-Laplacian system – which cannot be treated by the techniques
used by Ural‘tseva for equations – was achieved only ten years later
in the famous paper of Uhlenbeck. Once again, the techniques
did not apply in order to treat the time dependent parabolic case
and therefore it took almost another ten years until Dibenedetto
& Friedman proved a similar result for the parabolic p-Laplacian
system.
With respect to the boundary regularity the situation is quite different.
In the elliptic as well as in the parabolic case it is only known
for the equations that solutions are of class C1,α up to the boundary.
In this talk, Verena Bögelein will present a new global Lipschitz
regularity result for solutions to the parabolic p-Laplacian system.
The result also applies to a larger class of parabolic systems, the so
called asymptotically regular systems. The somewhat surprising
fact is that no quasi-diagonal structure has to be assumed.

This result is part of Verena Bögelein’s Habilitation thesis “Global Gradient Estimates for Degenerate and Singular Parabolic Systems”. After finishing her Ph.D. in 2007 at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Verena Bögelein got a two-year research scholarship at the Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy and subsequently substituted a chair at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.
At the moment she is working as a research associate at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

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if you want to know more about our lecture series, please have a look here.

Hey

i just read this little article about an engineer trying to interest his daughter in math..

have fun reading it 🙂

http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/cocktail_party_physics/2009/06/new-voices-math-sucks.html

by xkcd

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