Increases to staff-student ratios could send university into a ‘death spiral’, says union leader as vice-chancellor insists institution must act now

It has also been accused of breaking an agreement with staff

We give a sharp upper bound on the multiplicity of a fake weighted projective space with at worst canonical singularities. This is equivalent to giving a sharp upper bound on the index of the…

Noah Arbesfeld (Kavli IPMU)12 May 2022"Descendent series for Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces"Structure often emerges from Hilbert schemes of points on ...

The LMS Newsletter aims to provide a sense of identity, community, and connection for members. It communicates the power, beauty and value of mathematics and mathematical research by disseminating new mathematical ideas and information.

We introduce Tadao Oda's famous question on lattice polytopes which was originally posed at Oberwolfach in 1997 and, although simple to state, has remained unanswered. The question is motivated by a discussion of the two-dimensional case – including a proof of Pick's Theorem, which elegantly relates the area of a lattice polygon to the number of lattice points it contains in its interior and on its boundary.

We have developed a reinforcement learning agent that often finds a minimal sequence of unknotting crossing changes for a knot diagram with up to 200 crossings, hence giving an upper bound on the unknotting number. We have used this to determine the unknotting number of 57k knots. We took diagrams of connected sums of such knots with oppositely signed signatures, where the summands were overlaid. The agent has found examples where several of the crossing changes in an unknotting collection of crossings result in hyperbolic knots. Based on this, we have shown that, given knots K and K' that satisfy some mild assumptions, there is a diagram of their connected sum and u(K)+u(K') unknotting crossings such that changing any one of them results in a prime knot. As a by-product, we have obtained a dataset of 2.6 million distinct hard unknot diagrams; most of them under 35 crossings. Assuming the additivity of the unknotting number, we have determined the unknotting number of 43 at most 12-crossing knots for which the unknotting number is unknown.

Veronica Fantini (IHÉS)5 May 2022"Enumerative geometry in the extended tropical vertex group"The extended tropical vertex group is a pro-nilptotent Lie group...

Nikolaos Tsakanikas (Saarbrücken)28 April 2022"On the existence of minimal models for generalized pairs"I will discuss recent progress on the existence of mi...

Years ago, an audacious Fields medalist outlined a sweeping program that, he claimed, could be used to resolve a major problem in algebraic geometry. Other mathematicians had their doubts. Now he…

Nivedita Viswanathan (Loughborough)21 April 2022"On K-stability of some singular del Pezzo surfaces"There has been a lot of development recently in understan...

A set of 2n points in P^{n-1} is self-dual if it is invariant under the Gale transform. Motivated by Mukai’s work on canonical curves, Petrakiev showed that a general self-dual set of 14 points in P^6 arises as the intersection of the Grassmannian Gr(2,6) in its Plücker embedding in P^14 with a linear space of dimension 6. In this paper, we focus on the inverse problem of recovering such a linear space associated to a general self-dual set of points. We use numerical homotopy continuation to approach the problem and implement an algorithm in Julia to solve it. Along the way, we also implement the forward problem of slicing Grassmannians and use it to experimentally study the real solutions to this problem.

Jeff Hicks (Edinburgh)7 April 2022"Realizing tropical curves via mirror symmetry"The tropicalization map associates to each curve in the algebraic n-torus a ...

Franco Rota (Glasgow)31 March 2022"Full exceptional collection for anticanonical log del Pezzo surfaces"The homological mirror symmetry conjecture predicts a...

XTX Markets is a leading algorithmic trading firm which uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to produce price forecasts for over 50,000 financial instruments across equities, fixed…

Egor Yasinsky (École Polytechnique)24 March 2022"Birational involutions of the projective plane"Birational involutions of the projective plane (or, equivalen...

String Data is the leading international conference at the intersection of string theory, data science, and machine learning. Since its inception, the series has grown into a vibrant forum where…

I am a full professor at Institute of Mathematics of Polish Academy of Sciences (IMPAN). I also collaborate with Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Mechanics of University of Warsaw (MIMUW)...

Alessio Borzì (Warwick)17 March 2022"Weierstrass sets on finite graphs"Weiestrass points and Weierstrass semigroups are classical objects of study in Algebra...

We consider problems concerning the largest degrees of irreducible characters of symmetric groups, and the multiplicities of character degrees of symmetric groups. Using evidence from computer experiments, we posit several new conjectures or extensions of previous conjectures, and prove a number of results. One of these is that, if n >= 21, then there are at least eight irreducible characters of S_n, all of which have the same degree, and which have irreducible restriction to A_n. We explore similar questions about unipotent degrees of GL_n(q). We also make some remarks about how the experiments here shed light on posited algorithms for finding the largest irreducible character degree of S_n.