AustMS 2006

Since I happen to be around at the AustMS 06 conference at Macquarie University I probably have some obligation to blog about it. We're expecting mostly fine weather this week and a campus teeming with possums and parrots, as usual.

There are many parallel sessions. In the morning I went to the Math Physics session. Lucy Gow spoke about Yangians for Lie superalgebras and then we heard again from
Robert Coquereaux on Quantum Groupoids, but this time a powerpoint presentation which helpfully reproduced many of the graphs associated to SU(N) at level k.

The Category Theory session had four nice 25 minute talks, in particular by Panchadcharam on Mackey functors and by Pastro on the Frobeniusness of Hopf monoids in braided monoidal categories. This session was assigned one of the smallest seminar rooms, so all the seats were taken.

Terence Tao gave an astonishingly clear lecture in the afternoon on the existence of long arithmetic progressions in the primes and other matters prime. Apparently we know quite a lot about almost primes, which are integers with only a few prime factors, but getting a handle on the primes themselves is really tricky! He explained how subtle was the problem of separating structure in the primes from pseudorandomness. Tao finished the survey style talk by mentioning a best bound that is only known in terms of a 7-fold exponential: two to the two to the two to the...you get the idea...and apparently, if the Riemann hypothesis were true we would only be able to knock off one folding!

To finish the day there was anniversary cake (chocolate!) and champagne. Yum.