About:
How many holes are there in a straw? This question caught the imagination of the public and ‘the internet’ a few years ago, leading many to propose answers featuring in publications as diverse as Forbes and the Independent. Inevitably, there were also quite a few YouTube videos claiming to give the right answer.
The purpose of this lecture is indeed to give the right answer. More importantly, we will use this funny question as a starting point to think together about shape and its measurement. This will lead us into the current status of theories of shape with applications to topics as diverse as the shape of data, the shape of the universe, and surprising new states of matter determined by the shape of electron clouds.
Mathematics is often described as the study of numbers and figures. The previous edition of the ICMS Director’s Public Lecture was obsessive about numbers. In this lecture, figures will figure prominently.
Speaker Biography:
Minhyong Kim is Director and Sir Edmund Whittaker Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh. He works on arithmetic geometry, the study of spaces built out of finitely-generated systems of numbers, employing ideas of mathematical physics, especially topological quantum field theory. Minhyong studied mathematics at Seoul National University, then received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Yale University. He has held professorships at many institutions on three continents, including Purdue University, the Korea Institute for Advanced Study, University College London, and the University of Oxford, where he was head of the number theory research group. Before moving to Edinburgh, Minhyong was Christopher Zeeman Professor of Algebra, Geometry, and Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.
Minhyong is a keen communicator of mathematics and has published 12 books in Korea for the general public. His latest project is a series of illustrated children's books featuring a mathematician (who quickly disappears), his family (who search for him), and Schroedinger's cat (who does both).
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Drawings by Hong Seung Woo and Son Yein.