SEP 22 (SUN), JULY 20 (SAT): Science Cafe "Universe"

June 13, 2023
Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU)

The Kavli IPMU is proud to announce the beginning of our annual Science Cafe 2024 series "Universe", co-hosted with the Tamarokuto Science Center. This event will be in English.

Interested in testing your knowledge of the latest advances in Astronomy and Mathematics? We look forward to seeing you there. Pre-registration is required.

Science Cafe 2024 "Universe"


Time & Date: 2:00PM - 3:30PM, September 22 (Sun), 2024
Venue: Tamarokuto Science Center Event Hall

Knot invariants: How can we represent and study objects around us as mathematicians

Speaker: Dmytro Matvieievskyi (Kavli IPMU Project Researcher)
Difficulty level: Junior high school and above (the content is more appropriate for high school students. The event will be in English with no Japanese interpretation)
Seats: 40 (If the number of registrations surpasses the seats available, there will be a lottery. Registration deadline: September 9)
Admission: 400JPY (note: Visitors will also be required to pay the 520JPY entrance fee for the Tamarokuto Science Center. )
Click here to register (Tamarokuto Science Center website.

Introduction:Welcome to the mysterious world of knots! In this talk, I will show how a knot is a simple and easy to illustrate example of an everyday object that can be (and is) studied by mathematicians.
The study of invariants is possible by seeing whether it's possible to untie a trefoil knot.
I will show some examples with 3-colourings as the simplest non-trivial invariant that can already distinguish many knots.
Finally, I will move onto the Jones polynomial and how to get it from the perspective of trying to simplify a picture you have as much as possible without making it trivial.

About the speaker:
Dmytro joined Kavli IPMU in 2022. His field of expertise is mathematics.


Time & Date: 5:10PM - 6:50PM, July 20 (Sat), 2024
Venue: Science Egg, Tamarokuto Science Center

A pillar of precision cosmology in the 21st century: wide-field perturbation statistics 

Speaker: Angela Chen (Kavli IPMU Project Researcher)
Difficulty level: Junior high school and above (the content is more appropriate for high school students. The event will be in English with no Japanese interpretation)
Seats: 60 (First come, first served)
Admission: Free (note: Visitors are required to pay the 520JPY entrance fee for the Tamarokuto Science Center. )
Click here to register (Tamarokuto Science Center website. Registration opens on June 20th. )

Introduction:

Cosmology is a lively growing new field in physics, emerging from the intersection between astronomy and particle physics.

The subject of research in this field involves some of the most fascinating topics of our time: what is the composition of our universe, how it began, and where it goes. In this talk, I will start by introducing the currently most successful model to comprehensively explain our observation on the universe, the Lambda-CDM model, then dive into an important subfield of the probes that we use to learn about our universe, the wide-field perturbation statistics measurements on multiple messengers (cosmic microwave background, astrophysical objects …). In the end, I will present examples of how I use those kinds of measurements on the large-scale structure to learn some of the features of our universe, for example, how stable the dark matter is, and how baryonic feedbacks stir up the gravitationally formed structures.

About the speaker:
Anqi joined Kavli IPMU in 2021. Her area of expertise is Cosmology.