MSCS Seminar Calendar
Tuesday July 21, 2026
Inspiring Mathematics II Virtual fibring of manifolds and groups
Dawid Kielak (University of Oxford)
9:15 AM in 636 SEO
The topic of this talk is loosley the phenomenon of fibring over the circle for manifolds, and its group-theoretic twin, algebraic fibring. We will discuss the state of the art, and explain briefly some of the ideas behind the more recent developments, focusing on RFRS groups and manifolds with such fundamental groups. Then we will move on to a more speculative part, where many conjectures about fibring in higher dimensions will be given. The conjectures vary in their level of plausibility, but even the boldest of them might share the fate of Thurston's Virtually Fibred Conjecture, about which Thurston famously said: ``This dubious-sounding question seems to have a definite chance for a positive answer'' [https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01805]
[Preview of ICM talk]
Inspiring Mathematics II BPS cohomology in geometry and representation theory
Ben Davison (University of Edinburgh)
10:30 AM in 636 SEO
We motivate and survey the theory of BPS invariants of categories and BPS cohomology of stacks, indicating applications in enumerative geometry and representation theory, as well as recent advances.
[Preview of ICM talk]
Monday August 24, 2026
Wednesday September 16, 2026
Monday September 28, 2026
Wednesday October 14, 2026
