Olexandr Konovalov and Michael Torpey recently taught at two Software Carpentry workshops. The first one was a workshop for University of St Andrews researchers supported by CAPOD, and the second one was for the the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Critical Resource Catalysis (CRITICAT)
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Groups St Andrews 2017 in Birmingham took place on August 5th-13th. This is the tenth in the series of Groups St Andrews Conferences which have been held every four years from 1981. The main speakers were Michael Aschbacher (Caltech), Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace (Université Catholique de Louvain), Radha Kessar (City, University of London) and Gunter Malle (TU Kaiserlautern). One hour speakers were Tim Burness (Bristol), Vincent Guirardel (Université de Rennes 1), Harald Helfgott (Göttingen), Andrei Jaikin-Zapirain (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Donna Testerman (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). The organisers are Colin Campbell, Martyn Quick, Edmund Robertson and Colva Roney-Dougal together with Chris Parker from Birmingham.
The conference has been followed by a satellite event – a tutorial on the computational algebra system GAP on August 13th-14th. It has been organised by Olexandr Konovalov together with Sergey Shpectorov from Birmingham. On Sunday Olexandr Konovalov taught the Software Carpentry lesson “Programming with GAP”, and on Monday Markus Pfeiffer explained various aspects of using GAP effectively and demonstrated the GAP Jupyter interface being developed in the OpenDreamKit project.
A conference “All Kinds of Mathematics Remind me of You” to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of Peter Cameron took place in Lisbon on 24-27 July 2017. It was followed by a one-day workshop “Symmetry in Finite and Infinite Structures“. Both events took place at the University of Lisbon and were organised by mathematicians from Universidade Aberta and the Universities of Aveiro, Coimbra and Lisbon, led by João Araújo.
Quoting the School newsletter, participants ranged in academic age from Peter’s own DPhil supervisor Peter Neumann to recent St Andrews undergraduate Scott Harper. They included more than twenty co-authors including three with nine or more joint publications with him. The other participants from St Andrews were Rosemary Bailey (who spoke on “Circular designs with weak neighbour balance”), Collin Bleak, Julius Jonusas (“Universal words and sequences”), James Mitchell (“Semigroups from digraphs”), Shayo Olukoya (“Growth rates of automata groups generated by reset automaton”) and Wilf Wilson (“Maximal subsemigroups of monoids of partial order-(anti)endomorphisms”).
The final talk has been given by Peter himself and was entitled “Perchance to dream …”. It mentioned several outstanding problems, and Peter hopes that participants will solve many of these before the next conference!
In a series of five blog posts, Peter gave a detailed account of each day: see those for day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4 and the workshop.
On July 13th, we hosted the meeting of NBSAN (North British Semigroups and Applications Network). It was organised by Julius Jonusas, and the speakers were Nick Gilbert, Zur Izhakian, Mark Kambites, Matt McDevitt and Munazza Naz. Slides of some talks from the meeting are available on the NBSAN website.
Groups St Andrews 2017 takes place in Birmingham on August 5th-13th 2017. The talks will happen from 6th August until 12th August 2017 (inclusive). It will be followed by a satellite event – a tutorial on the computational algebra system GAP on August 13th-14th.
The Third Scottish Combinatorics Meeting on 24-25th April was hosted by Sophie Huczynska and Nik Ruskuc. Rosemary Bailey was one of the invited speakers and Matt McDevitt also gave a talk. Other invited speakers included Robert Brignall, who gained his PhD in St Andrews PhD in 2007 and who now works at the Open University, as well as being our Subhonours External Examiner. Following the meeting, Robert stayed from 26-28th April to collaborate with Nik on well quasi ordered-ness of pattern classes of permutations. Another invited speaker, Maura Paterson from Birkbeck, University of London also stayed from 26-28th April to work with Sophie on external difference families and related topics.
There will be a Workshop on Groups, Generalisations and Applications at the University of St Andrews on the afternoon of Thursday May 4, with talks by Ellen Henke, Murray Elder and Peter Cameron.
The Third Scottish Combinatorics Meeting on 24-25th April 2017 will be held in St Andrews; this is the first time the meeting has been held here with the previous two in the series having taken place at the University of Glasgow. Attendance is free, but anyone who would like to attend is encouraged to register by emailing the hosts, Sophie Huczynska and Nik Ruskuc. This will be followed by the British Colloquium in Theoretical Computer Science from 26-28th April, to be hosted by Markus Pfeiffer.
Reports from the Computational Mathematics with Jupyter workshop, organised jointly by the OpenDreamKit and CoDiMa projects at the ICMS in Edinburgh on 16-20th January, are now published on the Software Sustainability Institute blog: see here and here. There is also a digest of #JupyterICMS tweets.
In October 2016 the CoDiMa project organised the Second CoDiMa training school in Discrete Computational Mathematics, hosted at the ICMS. You can find the report on this event here.