May12: Women in Mathematics

May12: celebrating Women in Mathematics

May12: celebrating Women in Mathematics

schedule Date & time
Date/time
13 May 2024 10:00am - 13 May 2024 5:00pm
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Event series

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Akrti Tyagi
Administrative Officer (Communications, Engagement and Outreach)

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Description

May12 is an International initiative to celebrate women in Mathematics. It is held (since 2018) on the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields Medal. 

At ANU in 2024, will be celebrating with a one day event on Monday 13 May, bringing together our mathematical community, and all the groups working towards gender equality in STEM:

The Mathematical Sciences Institute, the ANU Mathematics Society, Fifty50, the ANU Women* In STEM Leadership Conference, the ANU Women in Physics, Astro and Engineering, the Rladies, the ANU-ASD Co-Lab , the College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics Diversity, Belonging, Inclusion, and Equity team, and the College of Science Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access team.

The event is designed to allow people to meet and chat informally, view the Australian Women of Mathematics exhibition and read the associated book, read messages from MSI alumni, and talk to all the groups involved (stalls will be set up to meet the community).

The event also features five 20 minute talks, accessible to people with knowledge of first year mathematics. 

As always, we make sure that the work required to celebrate and support women in Mathematics is carried by people of all genders.

If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation plan please contact the event organiser.

Registration will be much appreciated for catering purposes, but definitely feel free to drop in at any time during the day, and stay for as long or as little as you want!

If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation plan please contact the event organiser.

Schedule

event

schedule10 - 10:30am

Triangulations and friends

We will begin by looking at triangulations of a convex polygon, and its many appearances across mathematics. These triangulations also enjoy extremely nice combinatorial properties. For example, the number of ways to triangulate a convex (n+3)-gon is the nth Catalan number, a sequence that famously has dozens of combinatorial interpretations. What happens if we study triangulations of a non-convex n-gon? Can we make sense of triangulations of n points on a line? And why should we bother? In this talk I will argue why suitably defined triangulations in all of the above cases are equally fascinating (or perhaps even more so!). We will also dip into their surprising connections with other mathematical gadgets, including objects of representation theory.

schedule10:30-11

Time to chat and view the Australian Women of Mathematics exhibition

schedule11-11:30

The work of Maryam Mirzakhani (presented by Anand Deopurkar)

schedule11:30-12

The work of Ingrid Daubechies (presented by James Nichols)

schedule13-13:30

The work of Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (presented by Pierre Portal).

Prerequisites: some vague idea of what partial differential equations and matrices are.

The talk is an elementary introduction to Einstein equations of general relativity, leading to a hint at how Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat managed to reformulate them as a wave equation (showing well-posedness to mathematicians and the existence of gravitational waves to physicists). 

schedule13:30-14

The work of Hong Wang (presented by Po Lam Yung)

3 years out of her PhD, Hong Wang was awarded the prestigious Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize in 2022, for her advances on the restriction conjecture, the local smoothing conjecture and related problems. We will explain in elementary terms what these problems are, through which we will appreciate her deep insights how several areas of mathematics can be connected together.

schedule14-14:30

Time to chat and view the Australian Women of Mathematics exhibition

schedule14:30-16:30

Meet the community

Stalls and icebreaker activities

Location

Seminar Room 1.33 and 1.37

Hanna Neumann Building 145
Science Road

The Australian National University
Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country
Canberra ACT 0200
-35.275387198178, 149.11925554276