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International Women in Mathematics Day — May 12, 2026

King’s College London — KINGS BLDG K6.29 (Anatomy Lecture Theatre)

International Women in Mathematics Day at King’s College London is a one‑day celebration featuring research talks by PhD students and a keynote lecture.

• The event is free to attend, but registration is strongly encouraged for catering purposes. Click here to register.
• Questions? Contact .

Speakers

Click on the title for the abstract

Main speaker: Alice Milani (graphic novelist & illustrator) — Sofia Kovalevskaya, the life and revolutions of a brilliant mathematician.
Natasha Diederen (2nd year, Geometry) — When can a set have geometry?
Sara Varljen (3rd year, Number Theory) — Visualising Modular Groups
Alexandra Sorinca (2nd year, Disordered Systems) — Cloud Formation and Dynamics: a Field-Theoretic Approach
Noemi Cuppone (2nd year, Disordered Systems) — Topics in non-Hermitian random matrices
Isabel Rendell (4th year, Number Theory) — Rational points on curves
Jane Peltier (2nd year, Disordered Systems) — Chirality switching Active Brownian Particles with a continuous switching mechanism

Schedule

About the Keynote Speaker

Alice Milani is an Italian cartoonist and illustrator whose research‑driven graphic biographies present science to broad audiences, including Marie Curie and work on Sofia Kovalevskaya. Her pencil‑and‑watercolour style emphasizes clarity and accessibility. Learn more at riva-illustrations.com/artists/alice-milani/.

Titles and Abstracts

Alice Milani — Sofia Kovalevskaya, the life and revolutions of a brilliant mathematician.

Sofia Kovalevskaya's life was short but decidedly troubled and full of adventures. She was a brilliant mathematician, at a time when working women were rare. She was the first woman to hold a teaching position at a university in the modern sense, in Stockholm, in 1884. Her name has gone down in history for having developed the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem, as well as having written a novel and several plays. Alice Milani's comic book retraces her life and reinterprets it in a modern key, with expressive, colorful, and hilarious drawings.

Noemi Cuppone — Topics in non-Hermitian random matrices

Random Matrix Theory (RMT) is the study of the statistical properties of matrices with random entries. In RMT, one defines an ensemble of matrices by specifying the probability density function (PDF) of the matrix entries and the global symmetry properties of the matrices that belong to such ensemble. There are the two major categories of ensembles: Hermitian and non-Hermitian. The birth of RMT is generally dated back to the 1950s, when physicists were struggling in describing highly excited heavy nuclei formed in nuclear reactions and Hermitian random matrices turned out to be the correct tool to model such systems successfully. Hermiticity of a Hamiltonian ensures the conservation of probability in isolated quantum systems and guarantees the expectation value of energy is real. However, in the presence of flows of energy, particles, and information to and from those external degrees of freedom that lie outside of the Hilbert space of our interest, the probability associated with the inside part of the Hilbert space is effectively not conserved. Non-Hermitian matrices appear naturally in dynamical systems with non-reciprocal interactions as well, such as neural networks (both artificial or in the brain), scattering in chaotic quantum systems, growth processes, to mention a few. In this talk, after a brief historical outline, we will introduce some fundamental concepts and questions in non-Hermitian RMT, together with some interesting methods to address such questions.

Natasha Diederen — When can a set have geometry?

Questions in geometry are often studied using smooth surfaces, where differential quantities such as length, area and curvature are easily defined. However, many objects of geometric interest, both in mathematics and the physical world, exhibit singularities and thus cannot be considered within this framework. For example, Steiner trees, which minimise the total length of a network connecting a set of points, contain interior junction points, while soap films spanning tetrahedral or cubical wireframes minimise surface area but contain singular curves where several sheets meet. In this talk, we will explore, through a variety of examples, how the notion of a surface can be generalised to include such objects and discuss at what point a set becomes too irregular to admit a meaningful sense of geometry.

Jane Peltier — Chirality switching Active Brownian Particles with a continuous switching mechanism

Authors: Jane Peltier, Callum Britton, Laura Alvarez, Rosalba Garcia-Millan

A chiral active Brownian particle is a self-propelled particle whose motion combines straight-line swimming with steady rotation, so that its trajectory traces out loops in two dimensions. Some of these particles can spontaneously reverse their rotational direction. They are known as chirality switching Active Brownian Particles (switching cABPs). In existing models the switch is treated as instantaneous, but recent experiments on synthetic chiral swimmers show that the reconfiguration takes a finite time [1].

We develop a new model that captures this delay by introducing a continuous internal degree of freedom whose relaxation timescale sets the duration of the switch. Using a Doi-Peliti field-theoretic approach, we compute statistics of the trajectory and identify clear signatures of the delay. Most notably, we find a skewness in the velocity distribution that is absent when the switch is instantaneous. We also characterise the dynamics around a switching event through two-time correlation functions. These results provide quantitative predictions that can be tested directly against experiment.

[1] L. Alvarez et al., Nat Commun, 2021

Isabel Rendell — Rational points on curves

Faltings’ proof of the Mordell Conjecture tells us that for a nice curve of genus at least two, its set of rational points is finite. However, explicitly computing this finite set turns out to be an extremely non-trivial question. One approach is to construct a finite set of p-adic points on the curve which contains the rational points, compute this larger finite set, and then extract the rationals from it. Examples of this type of method are the Chabauty–Coleman method and Quadratic Chabauty, where Quadratic Chabauty is a special case of Kim’s generalisation of the Chabauty–Coleman method. I will give an overview of some of the main ideas that go into these methods, some open problems, and will illustrate throughout by examples.

Alexandra Sorinca — Cloud Formation and Dynamics: a Field-Theoretic Approach

Authors: Alexandra Sorinca, Tobias Sparmann, Michael te Vrugt, Rosalba Garcia-Millan, Gunnar Pruessner, and Peter Spichtinger

The formation of clouds and their dynamics are highly complex processes occurring in atmospheric physics. A cloud is made of water droplets and vapour, whose interplay through condensation, evaporation and sedimentation determines the cloud's evolution. In this project, we employ a novel combination of the Doi-Peliti and Martin-Siggia-Rose (MSR) field-theoretic frameworks to model cloud formation processes [1] [2]. Our approach offers a complete analytical formulation for interacting particle systems with time-evolving background fields. Its application to cloud microphysics represents a new perspective in atmospheric science, where most current models rely heavily on numerical simulations and large usage of data [3].

In our initial simplified model, we describe cloud formation using a Master Equation coupled to a Langevin equation: the former governing droplet formation as a discrete stochastic process, and the latter describing vapour dynamics as a continuous background field. These processes are mutually coupled through feedback. We cast these dynamics into a combined Doi-Peliti and MSR action. We analytically characterise statistical properties of the water droplets such as their expected number, fluctuations, and their correlation with the vapour field in a perturbation expansion about weak coupling. The results of this perturbative approach are supported numerically using Monte Carlo simulations. Our theoretical approach can be applied to other systems where particle–field interactions play an important role. This is the case, for instance, in the formation of amyloid aggregates that cause Alzheimer's disease [4] [5].

[1] Uwe C T¨auber. Critical dynamics: a field theory approach to equilibrium and non-equilibrium scaling behavior. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
[2] Benjamin Walter, Gunnar Pruessner, and Guillaume Salbreux. Field theory of survival probabilities, extreme values, first-passage times, and mean span of non-markovian stochastic processes. Physical Review Research, 4(4):043197, 2022.
[3] Hugh Morrison, Marcus van Lier-Walqui, Ann M Fridlind, Wojciech W Grabowski, Jerry Y Harrington, Corinna Hoose, Alexei Korolev, Matthew R Kumjian, Jason A Milbrandt, Hanna Pawlowska, et al. Confronting the challenge of modeling cloud and precipitation microphysics. Journal of advances in modeling earth systems, 12(8):e2019MS001689, 2020.
[4] Tuomas PJ Knowles, Michele Vendruscolo, and Christopher M Dobson. The amyloid state and its association with protein misfolding diseases. Nature reviews Molecular cell biology, 15(6):384–396, 2014.
[5] Tuomas PJ Knowles, Christopher A Waudby, Glyn L Devlin, Samuel IA Cohen, Adriano Aguzzi, Michele Vendruscolo, Eugene M Terentjev, Mark E Welland, and Christopher M Dobson. An analytical solution to the kinetics of breakable filament assembly. Science, 326(5959):1533–1537, 2009.

Sara Varljen — Visualising Modular Groups

In number theory, modular forms are powerful tools for addressing a wide range of significant problems, such as Fermat's Last Theorem. One of their defining properties is that they are invariant under the action of certain groups. In this talk, we will explore the geometric properties of these groups, focusing specifically on the classical SL(2, Z) and Bianchi groups. We will look at how they act on hyperbolic spaces, derive tessellations for these spaces, and gain some insight into the structure of the groups.