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Imperial Outreach STEM Lecture
This first come first served event opens to all school groups and individuals, aims to provide an insight on current popular research areas in different subject fields, and also gives students a chance to explore university life from different a prospective.
Time Table:
11:45 – 12:00 Registration
12:00– 13:00 STEM Lecture
13:00 – 13:30 Students’ experience talk – Imperial Outreach postgraduate ambassadors
13:30 – 14:30 Campus tour for booked groups/individuals (subject to the availability of student tour guides)
Professor Kevin Buzzard
Kevin Mark Buzzard is currently a Professor of Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London He specialises in algebraic number theory.
He obtained a B.A. degree in Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Senior Wrangler (achiever of the highest mark), and went on to complete the C.A.S.M. He then completed his dissertation, entitled The levels of modular representations, under the supervision of Richard Taylor, for which he was awarded a Ph.D. degree.
He took a lectureship at Imperial College London in 1998, a readership in 2002, and was appointed to a professorship in 2004. From October to December 2002 he held a visiting professorship at Harvard University, having previously worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1995), the University of California Berkeley (1996-7), and the Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris (2000).
He was awarded a Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society in 2002 for “his distinguished work in number theory”, and the Senior Berwick Prize in 2008, While attending the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe he earned a gold medal with a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
He was notably advisor to the musician Dan Snaith, who records as Caribou. His favourite number is 65537.
About this lecture
Whole numbers are really easy. But there are questions about whole numbers that are really simple to understand and yet really hard to solve. In fact there are plenty of questions about whole numbers that no-one in the world can solve. Some of them are just for fun, but others turn out to be really important. For example if you could solve one of them then you could break the encryption algorithms used on wireless networks. I’ll explain some of these questions.