Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics

Following Lord Kelvin’s attempt to establish a vortex atom theory of matter (a proper topological field ‘theory of everything’ ante litteram), Peter Guthrie Tait undertook the immense task of studying and classifying knots and links, thus contributing to the origin of the mathematics of knot theory. His work remained ...

In 1995, James Dolan and I formulated a series of “hypotheses” about topology and higher categories, before the theory of higher categories was sufficiently developed to make these into precisely stated conjectures. In 2009 Jacob Lurie reformulated one of these using infinity-categories, called it the “cobordism hypothesis”, and gave a ...

People have been modeling music geometrically for more than 300 years. Early in the twenty first century it became clear that many existing models were orbifolds, quotients of R^n (known to musicians as "n-note ordered pitch space") by various symmetry groups (e.g. the "OPTI" symmetries containing octave shifts ...

This purpose of this informal workshop is to discuss connections between music theory and topics in mathematics including groupoids and self-similar quasicrystals.

Natural ecosystems display an extraordinary diversity of species, a phenomenon that has recently attracted the interest not only of ecologists but also of theoretical physicists. In this talk, I will introduce a Generalised Lotka–Volterra model of ecological communities that accounts for random interactions among species and finite noise. Remarkably ...