Past Events

The PIMS-UBC Math Job Forum is an annual Forum to help graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in Mathematics and related areas with their job searches. The session is divided in two parts: short presentations from our panel followed by a...

For over a century, the development and replacement of reptile teeth has been of interest originally for its value in comparative anatomy and evolutionary biology due to the prevalence of teeth in the fossil record and more recently as a model system...

The periodic orbits and their structure are fundamental features of a dynamical system. In an algebraic setting, where the system is defined by polynomials, we can use tools from algebraic or arithmetic geometry to study these orbits. Important...

Richard Guy loved problems. He loved to share them and to encourage others to explore them. He loved to work with superstars like John Conway and make their ideas accessible to a wider world. But Richard also had a few problems that he obsessed on in...

Resolving a conjecture of Erdos and Turan from the 1930's, in the 1970's Szemeredi showed that a set of integers with positive upper density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Soon thereafter, Furstenberg used Ergodic Theory to gave a...

PIMS is excited to host the 2022 CRM-Fields-PIMS prize winner for an afternoon lecture. The 2021 winner, Andrew Granville, will be presenting at the University of British Columbia. The lecture will be online, allowing members from the PIMS community...

There are two rotary motors in biology, ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellar motor. Both are driven by transmembrane ionic currents. We consider an idealized model of such a motor, essentially an electrostatic turbine. The model has a rotor and a...

Abstract: Consider Z^2, and assign a random length of 1 or 2 to each edge based on independent fair coin tosses. The resulting random geometry, first passage percloation, is conjectured to have a scaling limit. Most random plane geometric models...

Patterns are widespread in nature and often form during early development due to the self-organization of cells or other independent agents. One example are zebrafish (Danio rerio): wild-type zebrafish have regular black and gold stripes, while...