Please join our first Fields@Queen's lecture series in Mathematics & Statistics. We are excited to have Prof. Amie Wilkinson (University of Chicago) give two lectures at Queen's!

The first lecture (The mathematics of déjà vu) is aimed at a broad audience and will be on Thursday, April 5th at 5:30pm in Jeffery Hall, Room 127. Refreshments will be served starting at 5pm in the first floor lobby of Jeffery Hall.

These events are funded by The Fields Institute and the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Queen's.

Lecture 1 (general audience)

TITLE: The mathematics of déjà vu.

ABSTRACT: Dynamics is an area of mathematics concerned with the motion of spaces ("dynamical systems") over time. Dynamics has its roots in the late nineteenth century, when it was developed as a tool to understand physical phenomena, such as the motion of gas molecules in a box and planets around the sun.  A simple and yet powerful concept in dynamics is that of recurrence. In everyday language, recurrence is the mathematical version of déja vu: a motion of a space is recurrent if, given enough time, it eventually returns to its original configuration (allowing for a small amount of error).  In this talk, I will describe how mathematical results about recurrence can be used to answer surprisingly disparate questions, from the mixing and unmixing of two ideal gases in a box, to deep properties of the prime numbers, to the discovery of exoplanets in nearby solar systems.