School of Business
Business and Economics Insight Research Group
Site kindly hosted by theoremoftheday.org 
The Maths Study Group is an initiative of the
former department of Maths, Stats and Foundation Studies, aimed at providing a
forum for mathematically-minded people, within the Faculty and elsewhere, to meet
and share ideas.
Each week somebody gives an expository talk
with the aim of increasing everybody's mathematical general knowledge.
Talks currently take place at approx. 1600 and are preceded by tea. Location details are emailed nearer the time: let Carrie Rutherford know if you would like to be added to the mailing list.
MSG meetings are currently hybrid in-person/videoconference events. Contact Carrie to get attendance/access details.
NEXT MEETING: Thursday 22nd May, Carrie Rutherford (LSBU) "The Shrikhande graph, part 3"
Forthcoming talks/events
- Thursday 29th May, Carrie Rutherford (LSBU) "The Shrikhande graph, part 4"
- Wednesday 4th June, outing to the LMS–Gresham College lecture: Robin Wilson, "Sum Stories: Equations and their Origins" (register via link to attend, actual/virtual)
- Thursday 12th June, tbc
Previous talks/events (talks from previous years archived here)
- Thursday 15th May, Tony Forbes (LSBU), The design spectrum of the Shrikhande graph (joint work with C.G Rutherford; arxiv)
- Wednesday 7th and Thursday 8th May: 2025 Colloquia in Combinatorics
QMUL and UCL
- Wednesday, 7th May, outing to IMA-LMS Christopher Zeeman Lecture and Medal Presentation 2025, Brady Haran, “Treasure Trove: Amazing Objects from the World of Mathematics”
- Thursday 1st May, Carrie Rutherford (LSBU) "The Shrikhande graph, part 2"
- Thursday 17th April, Carrie Rutherford (LSBU) "The Shrikhande graph" (inspired by this Peter Cameron blog post, and Stephen Meskin draws our attention to
a fine article in Resonance magazine)
- Thursday 10th April, Robin Whitty, Catalan numbers (slides)
- Thursday 6th March, Tony Forbes (LSBU), "Rubik's Revenge edge permutations" (notes)
- Tuesday 25th February, virtual outing to Oxford Discrete Mathematics and Probability Seminar, Rachel Greenfeld (Northwestern University),"Integer distance sets" (her joint paper)
- Thursday 20th February, Robin Whitty, "Nested sums, ballots and Catalan's triangle, Part 2" (slides)
- Thursday 13th February, Tony Forbes, "Rubik's cube edge permutations" notes
- Thursday 19th December, Robin Whitty "V. Dardanoni's Pedagogical proof of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem" (slides, a link to Dardanoni's paper is here (note (2)), as is (note (5)) a Youtube film about another impossibility theorem)
- Thursday 12th December, Graham Lovegrove (Open), "The moving sofa problem" (including this Numberphile video)
- Thursday 5th December, Carrie Rutherford (LSBU), "Elections and impossibility theorems, Part 2" (based on this paper by John Geanakoplos)
- Friday 29th November, Robin Whitty, "Nested sums, ballots and Catalan's triangle"
- Wednesday 27th November, outing to IMA David Youdan Medal Lecture: Alan Champneys, "Breaking the rules; the role of creativity in the mathematical sciences"
- Thursday 21st November, Tony Forbes (LSBU), "Birthday paradoxes and unrelated matters"
- Wednesday 20th November, LMS Society Meeting: Mary Cartwright Lecture 2024
- Thursday 14th November, Mohamed Mehbali (LSBU), "The Basel Problem"
- Thursday 7th November, Carrie Rutherford (LSBU), "Elections and impossibility theorems" (based on this paper by John Geanakoplos)
- Thursday 31st October, Mohamed Mehbali (LSBU), "Exploring the zeta function and the Riemann Hypothesis" (slides)
- Wednesday 9th October, outing to BSHM-Gresham College Lecture: Rob Eastaway, "Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times"
- Thursday 3rd October, Tony Forbes (LSBU), "The perfect riffle shuffles" (notes)
Archive
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| Some speaker notes (generally pdf < 1MB unless stated, open in new window) |
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Peter Cameron (St Andrews and Queen Mary): Hadamard matrices
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Graham Farr (Monash): Minors for alternating dimaps, Transforms, minors and generalised Tutte polynomials
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Tony Forbes: Rubik's Revenge edge permutations, Rubik's cube edge processes, The perfect riffle shuffles, Bricks (joint with Kira Bhana),Ovals, Small regular graphs of girth 5, Bernoulli Polynomials (updated 4.11.15), Poncelet's Porism and Elliptic Curves (1.3MB),
The Towers of Hanoi, Regular Polytopes, Decision problems for linear recurrence sequences (updated 27.10.15), The Bruck–Ryser Theorem, Wilson's Theorem in design theory, Primality without recourse to arithmetic, The Hardy–Littlewood Circle Method, Congruence properties of the partition function, Integer Factorization, Elliptic curves, factorization and primality testing, Applications of Weil's Theorem on Character Sums
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Graham Lovegrove (Open): Convex Polygons in the plane (by Erdos and Szekeres), Packing 6 × 2 × 1 bricks into a 7 × 7 × 7 box, The Tutte and chromatic polynomials, Problem 29 from the ex-Cameron set, A Theorem of Euler’s: The Penatagonal Number Theorem - another proof from The BOOK, The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem: proofs from the Book, The slope problem, Tiling Rectangles: 3 Proofs from the BOOK, Young tableaux and the hook formula, The probabilistic method (1.5MB) |
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Mohamed Mehbali (LSBU): Exploring the Zeta function and Riemann Hypothesis, About the distribution of the prime numbers |
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Gary Michalek, (La Salle): Writing Numbers in Base N (Number Systems and Just Touching Covering Systems) |
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Michael Olorunsaiye, (Covenant University, Nigeria): Generalities about partial C*-algebras
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Nigel Phillips (LSBU): Algorithmic Probability, Computability and Probabilistic Machines, On playing several games at once |
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Francesca Merola (Roma Tre University): On Hamiltonian cycle systems with a nice automorphism group
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Jon Selig (LSBU): Screw systems and their classification, The Petersen–Morley Theorem, The catalecticant, Gröbner Bases Part I: Varieties and Ideals, Gröbner Bases Part II: Monomial Orders and the Division Algorithm, Gröbner Bases Part III: Gröbner bases and monomial ideals, Gröbner Bases IV: Buchberger's Algorithm, Clifford algebras and computational algebra, Molien's theorem in invariant theory, Representations of GL(n), Hopf algebras, Chicks, eggs and advertising |
| Leonard Soicher (QMUL):
A new upper bound on the clique number of a strongly regular graph |
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Robin Whitty: Euler tours and sets of permutations, Pascal's triangle, Pascal's triangle minus 1, Congruent numbers (in tribute to Jerrold Tunnell), The polygonal number theorem, Bisecting a triangle in a given direction, Finding a continued fraction for Tau, Graceful trees and graphs |
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Taoyang Wu (East Anglia): Expanders: Background, Expanders: Zig-zag product, Applications of Sperner's Lemma, Graph Homomorphisms: a language |
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Comments or queries about the Maths Study Group
or this page: Carrie Rutherford