Simon Smith gave a talk at the 2021 British Mathematical Colloquium
This year’s British Mathematical Colloquium was supposed to be held at the University of Glasgow, but because of COVID restrictions it was held virtually in Glasgow. The organisers did an amazing job of making attendees feel like they were actually in Glasgow, using a platform called Sococo. You could “walk” around a top-down view of buildings at the university. Talks were held in various virtual rooms, so your avatar would enter a room to see the link to the zoom lecture taking place in that room. Sococo allowed the organisers to put a beach near the campus so attendees could soak up some virtual sun.
Simon Smith attended the conference, and gave an invited talk in the Group Theory workshop on his recent joint work with Colin Reid on the theory of local action diagrams (essentially a “local action” complement to classical Bass-Serre theory). Other speakers (who were all excellent) in the workshop were:
- Robert Chamberlain (Warwick), who spoke about minimal permutation representations of finite groups;
- Nayab Khalid (St Andrews), who spoke about an infinite geometric presentation for Thompson’s group F;
- Alan Logan (Heriot-Watt), who spoke about equalisers of free group homomorphisms and Post’s correspondence problem;
- Radhika Gupta (Temple), who spoke about non-uniquely ergodic arational trees in the boundary of Outer space;
- Alex Evetts (ESI), who spoke about conjugacy growth of finitely generated groups; and
- Gareth Tracey (Oxford), who spoke about Invariable generation and the Chebotarev invariant of a finite group
Charlotte Scott Centre for Algebra 
Reblogged this on Maths & Physics News.
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