Monday 6th of May 2024, 13:30-14:30 in HG03.082
Kevin Zwart
Representation theory: why should you care?
Maths is a very broad field, to a level where two PhD students often cannot talk about their research topics without giving a talk or two just to introduce the topic, and afterwards you sometimes wonder why this would be interesting to look at. In this talk, we will go the other way around: we will focus on applications of abstract representation theory in other fields to motivate you to be interested in said theory. There are plenty of applications one can think of, even for those not into the hardcore math. For example, one can classify the elementary particles, solve PDEs, or describe Fourier Analysis on tori with representation theory. We will discuss each of the previous examples, and if time permits, we also discuss some more abstract mathematical constructions such as symmetric spaces, orthogonal polynomials or modular functions.