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14:00 Martin Taylor (Imperial): The Formation of Black Holes in General Relativity.
In 2008 Christodoulou showed, in a 600 page monograph with the above title, that trapped surfaces can form in pure general relativity, from initial conditions arbitrarily far from containing a trapped surface, through the focusing of gravitational waves. The result is monumental; the main new ingredient of the proof, the short pulse method, offers the first foray into the long time dynamics of general relativity in the large. The aim of the talk is to put this result into perspective and explain why it is such a landmark in the field.

15:00 Madeleine Whybrow (Imperial): An Introduction to the Monster and Majorana Theory.
Abstract TBA