MaPS – MaPSS Seminar Series

Welcome to the webpage for the Mathematical Postgraduate Seminar Series (MaPSS). We’re committed to fostering a friendly atmosphere in the school of Mathematics and Statistics. All maths postgraduate students are encouraged to present. It’s an excellent opportunity to hone presentation skills and talk about fun new topics. Most of all, it’s a great way of getting to know your fellow students. So come along and meet some friends over free pizza!

If you or anyone you know is interested in presenting, or for any other enquiries, please contact the MaPSS organisers: Eric Hester, Alexander Kerschl, Nathan Duignan, and Giulian Wiggins.

MaPSS also ran in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

See also the postgraduate reading groups.

Seminars in 2020, Semester 1

All seminars will be held at 5:00 pm on Mondays in Carslaw Room 535A, with free pizza and soft drink after the talk.

Monday, March 2nd

Yilin Ma (The University of Sydny)— Inverse Problems on Riemann Surfaces

We will introduce some basic notions of the Calderon problems and in particular their formulations on Riemann surfaces. Amongst all geometric settings for such problems, results on Riemann surfaces have been most satisfying. We will describe state of the art techniques in solving such problems, which involves existence theory for holomorphic Morse functions with real boundary conditions. Using this result and by proving a class of Carleman estimates, we will construct complex geometric optic solutions which can be used to solve the Calderon problems in two dimensions. If time permits, we will also look at inverse problems in higher dimensions, and briefly discuss why the same technique have limitations on general Riemannian manifolds.

Monday, March 9th

Adarsh Kumbhari (The University of Sydny) — Using circuits to understand immune self-regulation

T cells are specialised immune cells responsible for killing pathogens. How these cells are able to self-regulate, however, is unknown. Inspired by analogies with electrical circuts, we develop a mathematical model to infer how immune dynamics are driven by “input signals”. We find that T cell expansion may be a change-detection system, both in response to checkpoint and antigen expression, which has implications for immune therapies against cancer.