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Week starting Monday 20 May 2019
3pm 20 May - MSI Honours Seminar Series
Talk 1 (James King): An Introduction to the Transportation of Mass
In life, it is intrinsically desirable to optimise. One area where optimisation is important is in the transportation of materials. Specifically, we are interested in the transportation of an initial distribution of materials to another final distribution. A natural model for such a situation is that of a function, mapping points in the support of the initial distribution to points in the support of the final one. This function tells us where to spend each unit of Mass. Transporting materials naturally incurs a cost, and we are interested in the existence of a function as described above that minimises this total cost.
However, such a function rarely exists. Hence, we must construct a weaker formulation of the problem and analyse its properties. This is the subject of the talk.
Talk 2 (Yuxi Liu): AIXI, the Universal Intelligence
Superhuman AI might finally arise within this century. In order to understand what such a creature would do, and to build one, a theoretical model of intelligence is needed. AIXI is such a model of intelligence, which has been proven by Marcus Hutter (professor at ANU) to be the most "universally intelligent", in some mathematical sense.
In this talk, I will explain how AIXI is built up from some philosophical considerations, and how these philosophical foundations are encoded in one big formula.
Talk 3 (Yiming Xu): An illustrative introduction to theorem prover HOL4.
10am 22 May
Over the next 3 weeks, we will review classical notions of Hodge structures and how they arise in complex algebraic geometry. We will then try to understand the construction of Hodge structures from categories of representations (by Geordie Williamson and Ben Elias) and combinatorial geometry (by Peter McMullen, Karim Adiprasito, June Huh, and Eric Katz).
The first meeting will be tomorrow (Wednesday) in room 1.37 from 10am to 11am, and the following meetings (tentatively) at the same time on Wednesdays and Fridays.
10am 22 May
Over the next 3 weeks, we will review classical notions of Hodge structures and how they arise in complex algebraic geometry. We will then try to understand the construction of Hodge structures from categories of representations (by Geordie Williamson and Ben Elias) and combinatorial geometry (by Peter McMullen, Karim Adiprasito, June Huh, and Eric Katz).
The first meeting will be tomorrow (Wednesday) in room 1.37 from 10am to 11am, and the following meetings (tentatively) at the same time on Wednesdays and Fridays.
5.30pm 23 May - Friends & alumni program
Ideas from many branches of mathematics have been used by artists and critics to create or analyse works of art.
They have been used to influence the content, the colours, the composition and the temporal structure of works.
These applications have ranged from productive to downright silly, and this lecture will include examples of both kinds.
For instance, a number of twentieth century composers explored the use of stochastic processes in works of “aleatoric music”, and some twenty-first century artists from the ANU have adapted these musical ideas in visual and audio-visual works. Merely selecting elements at random adds little to a work but, as the composers discovered, stochastic processes with appropriate structure can provide texture in a work whose main features are still determined by the composer.
A good example of these processes is a Markov chain: a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. A Markov chain is particularly convenient because it has significant features that are easily revealed by some simple matrix algebra, which explains one interconnection between mathematics and art.
About the speaker
Tim Brook is a practising artist and a lapsed mathematician. He specialises in the animation of still images using long slow dissolves, blending slides one after another to produce a sequence of slowly changing images. He describes a slide-tape work as an invitation to make connections—an audience is invited to observe not things but relationships between things. As such, meaning appears in the space between the images.
if you have any special dietary requirements, please send an email to macarena.rojas@anu.edu.au.
