The EMPG Pre-Seminars

The EMPG pre-seminars are organised in conjunction with the main EMPG seminars that usually take place immediately afterwards. The idea behind the pre-seminar is to provide background and context for the actual seminar, i.e. to allow the non-specialist listeners to get past the first five minutes. If we cannot arrange a member of staff or a graduate student to give the heads-up on whatever topic the EMPG seminar is dealing with, "volunteers" will be recruited to speak about more general topics in mathematical physics that will hopefully be of interest to everybody.

The pre-seminar takes place in the same location as the main seminar, unless specified otherwise below.

Time: Wednesdays, 3:00 pm
Place: Room M320, Scott-Russell building (HW-mathematics)
Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton Campus, Edinburgh

If you have any questions or better yet, would like to give a talk in our time slot, please contact Hannu Rajaniemi.

Summer Term 2004

11 May
Joost Slingerland (Heriot-Watt)
Basics of quantum computing
5 May
Stefan Groot Nibbelink (Minneapolis)
Stringy profiles of gauge field tadpoles near orbifold singularities
21 April
Hannu Rajaniemi (Edinburgh)
Group actions, the adjoint representation of a Lie group and the universal enveloping algebra

Spring Term 2004

Note that this term the pre-seminars take place in Room M320, Heriot-Watt, at 3pm!

3 March
José Figueroa-O'Farrill (Edinburgh)
Lie superalgebras from supergravity
18 February
Robert Weston (Heriot-Watt)
Yangians for young ones
11 February
Michela Petrini (CPHT, Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau and Tours University))
String compactifications and G-structures
4 February
Joost Slingerland (Heriot-Watt)
The quantum double of a group and its representation theory
28 January
José Figueroa-O'Farrill (Edinburgh)
Quotienting string backgrounds
14 January
Simon Philip (Edinburgh)
Quantising the superparticle

Autumn Term 2003

10 December
Steffen Krusch (Heriot-Watt)
Solitons and Moduli Spaces
3 December
Hannu Rajaniemi (Edinburgh)
Wrapping branes
28 November
Nick Dorey (Swansea)
An introduction to S-duality
26 November
José Figueroa-O'Farrill (Edinburgh)
An introduction to knot invariants
11 November
Conor Houghton (Dublin)
An introduction to Nahm equations
5 November
George Moutsopoulos (Edinburgh)
Generalized holonomy
29 October
Joost Slingerland (Edinburgh)
Bosons, Fermions, Anyons and Plektons, some constructions
22 October
Hannu Rajaniemi (Edinburgh)
What time is it on the plane wave?
15 October
Informal discussion about this paper as background for the main seminar.
8 October
José Figueroa-O'Farrill (Edinburgh)
What the Penrose limit can do for you

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