The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is required in advance – book your seat via Eventbrite
A pre-lecture reception with tea, coffee and cakes will be held from 16:45 on the level 1 mezzanine.
Interact with the list lecture via the hashtag #breakingshapes
Abstract
Fano varieties are basic building blocks in geometry. They are the “atomic pieces” of mathematical shapes, which can be assembled into more complex shapes in many different ways.
Professor Coates works on a program to find and classify Fano varieties in two, three, and four dimensions, thereby assembling a “periodic table” of shapes. This ongoing work with many mathematicians from around the world, brings together ideas from fields as diverse as geometry, string theory, combinatorics, number theory, and high performance computation.
In his inaugural lecture Professor Coates will describe this work, touching on its applications in cryptography, scientific computing and physics, where it could potentially answer questions about the shape of spacetime. He will also describe a collaboration with the artist Gemma Anderson, which gives these strikingly beautiful geometries visual and physical form.
Biography
Tom Coates is Professor of Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, before moving to Harvard University as Assistant Professor in 2003. He joined Imperial College as a Royal Society University Research Fellow in 2007.
His research interests are in algebraic and complex geometry, particularly Mirror Symmetry, and in scientific computation. Prof. Coates was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Mathematics in 2010; a London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize in 2014; and the Adams Prize in 2015.