5th meeting of the

North British Mathematical Physics Seminar


The fifth meeting of the North British Mathematical Physics Seminar will take place on  Saturday 15th March 2003 at the University of York.  The meeting will be held in the Department of Mathematics, Goodricke College. (Note that we've moved south across the lake since most of you were last here!) Coffee and tea will be in the first-floor Maths Dept coffee room, G/109. Talks will be downstairs in G/045..

Programme

1100-1130  Coffee
1130-1220  John Harnad (Montreal and Oxford)
                    Random Matrices and Dual Isomonodromic Deformations
1230-1330  Lunch
1330-1420  Felipe Leitner  (Edinburgh)
                    Twistor and Killing Spinors in Lorentzian Geometry
1430-1520  Mitch Pfenning (York)
                    Quantum Inequalities and Constraints on the Casimir Vacuum
1530-1600  Tea
1600-1630  Anthony Owen  (Durham)
                     CP violation, discrete torsion and D-branes
1640-1710  Catherine Meusburger  (Heriot-Watt)
                    Poisson structure and Symmetry in Chern-Simons 2+1D gravity
         1715  Close

Practical Information

Maps of York showing the location of the university campus can be obtained here and here. Mathematics is in Goodricke College, building 24 on the campus map. Please email Niall MacKay if you need a parking permit -- here is the map of car parks on campus. The taxi fare from the railway station is around £5. Buses are supposed to be every 15 minutes, but can be rather random -- sometimes one has to wait half-an-hour. The station is on the north-west side of York while the campus is about a mile and a half south-east of the city centre: the walk takes about 35 minutes.

Train information can be obtained from Railtrack.

Tea, coffee, biscuits and doughnuts will be provided free of charge.
We'll have lunch somewhere on campus (paying individually).
After the meeting we'll go to a pub (the Olde Starre Inne on Stonegate, right in the city centre and about 5 mins walk from the railway station - it's very quiet during the week; I can only hope that we'll find it so on a Saturday) and maybe, for anyone interested, on for a meal.

Limited funds are available to help with travel expenses of participants with no other source of funding.
We hope that this will encourage postgraduate students and postdocs to attend the meeting.
Please email Niall MacKay in advance if you would like to apply for support --
and please book early to take advantage of the cheaper train fares.

Postscript

The meeting was held successfully, and the improved quality of the coffee and biscuits
was commented upon. These people participated.