IOP Lab in a Lorry is comming to Wales

lorry

The Lab in a Lorry will be touring around Wales in April and June 2013. Follow the link below for more details

Lab in a Lorry is an interactive mobile science laboratory staffed by practising scientists and engineers.

The aim of Lab in a Lorry is to give young people aged 11-14 the opportunity to do experimental science in the way it actually happens; exploratory, accidental, informed by curiosity and intuition, but also bounded and guided by the experience and insight of practicing scientists.

http://www.labinalorry.org.uk/about_lab_in_a_lorry.cfm

Looking for volunteers
James Bamford, Senior Operations Coordinator – Lab in a Lorry, has made a call for volunteers to help run the events. A poster for the call can be found here (opens pdf).

Link
Lab in a Lorry

Jacobi algebroids and quasi Q-manifolds revisited

I have already spoken about Jacobi algebroids and quasi Q-manifolds in earliear posts here and here. Details can be found in [1].

In the paper [1] I show that a Jacobi algebroid, which is nothing more than a linear odd Jacobi bracket on a vector bundle, is equivalent to a weight one quasi Q-manifold structure.

A little more specifically, consider the supermanifold \(\Pi E \) build from a vector bundle \(E \rightarrow M\). The supermanifold \(\Pi E \) is equipped with natural coordinates \((x^{A}, \xi^{\alpha})\). Recall that \(\Pi\) is the parity reversion functor and that it shits the parity of the fibre coordinates. So, is we have fibre coordinate \((y^{\alpha})\) on \(E\) of parity \(\widetilde{y^{\alpha}} =\widetilde{\alpha}\), then \(\widetilde{\xi^{\alpha}}= \widetilde{\alpha}+1 \). The weight is assigned naturally as zero to the base coordinates and one to the fibre coordinates. The parity reversion functor does not act on the weights.

A Jacobi algebroid is then in one-to-one equivalence with an odd vector field on \(\Pi E\)

\(D = \xi^{\alpha}Q_{\alpha}^{A}(x) \frac{\partial}{\partial x^{A}} + \frac{1}{2} \xi^{\alpha}\xi^{\beta}Q_{\beta \alpha}^{\gamma}(x) \frac{\partial}{\partial \xi^{\gamma}}\),

and an odd function also on \(\Pi E\)

\(q = \xi^{\alpha}Q_{\alpha}(x)\),

both of weight one and satisfy

\(\left[D,D\right] = 2 q D\) and \(D(q)=0\).

A supermanifold with such a structure I call a quasi Q-manifold.

Back to Lie algebroids
There is a well established one-to-one correspondence between Jacobi algebroids and Lie algebroids in the presence of a one cocycle [2,3]. A Lie algerbroid in the presence of a one cocycle is understood as a \((\Pi E, Q, \phi)\), where \(Q\) is a homological vector field of weight one and \(\phi \) is a weight one (linear) function on \(\Pi E\). Now as we are in the category of supermanifold, we need to insist that the weight one function is odd. The structures here satisfy

\(Q^{2}=0\) and \(Q(\phi) =0\).

Now, given the initial data of a weight one quasi Q-manifold that encodes the Jacobi algebroid we can pass directly to a Lie algebroid in the presence of an odd one cocyle viz

\(Q = D {-} q \Delta\)
and set
\(\phi = q\),

where \(\Delta\) is the Euler vector field, which in local coordinates looks like

\(\Delta = \xi^{\alpha} \frac{\partial}{\partial \xi^{\alpha}}\).

So, now what about the bracket on sections of this Lie algebroid and the anchor?

By thinking of the sections of our vector bundle \(E\rightarrow M\) as weight minus one vector fields on \(\Pi E\), we can use the derived bracket formalism. In particular

\(u = u^{\alpha}(x)s_{\alpha} \longrightarrow i_{u} = (-1)^{\widetilde{u}}u^{\alpha}(x)\frac{\partial}{\partial \xi^{\alpha}}\)

provides us with the appropriate identification. Then

\(a(u)(f) := \left[\left[Q, i_{u}\right],f \right] = [[D, i_{u}],f]\)

and

\(i_{[u,v]} := (-1)^{\widetilde{u}}[[Q, i_{u}], i_{v}] =(-1)^{\widetilde{u}} [[D,i_{u}], i_{v}] + i_{u}(q) i_{v} – (-1)^{\widetilde{u} \widetilde{v}}i_{v}(q)i_{u}\),

where \(u,v \in \Gamma(E)\) and \(f \in C^{\infty}(M)\).

The interested reader can now work out all the local expressions if they want, it is not hard to do so.

The final remark must be that similar formula appear in the existing literature on Jacobi algebroids for the Lie bracket. This I may try to unravel at some point.

References
[1]Andrew James Bruce, Odd Jacobi manifolds: general theory and applications to generalised Lie algebroids, Extracta Math. 27(1) (2012), 91-123.

[2]J. Grabowski and G. Marmo, Jacobi structures revisited, J. Phys. A: Math. Gen., 34:10975–10990, 2001.

[3]D. Iglesias and J.C. Marrero. Generalized Lie bialgebroids and Jacobi structures, J. Geom. and Phys., 40, 176–199, 2001.

Thoughts about Research – a list of interesting quotes

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photo

Professor Piotr Pragacz, a mathematician working in the area of algebraic geometry here at IMPAN, has collected a few quotes on mathematics and science a little more generally.

Some of my favorites listed include

Nicolaus Copernicus: “Mathematics is written for mathematicians.”

Godfrey H. Hardy: “Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.”

Albert Einstein: “The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

David Hibert: “One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.”

Henri Poincaré: “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.”

And my personal favorite

Winston Churchill: “Success consists of going from failure
to failure without loss of enthusiasm. ”

Follow the link below for many more quotes.

Link
Thoughts About Research

The most irrational day of the year!

Pi Day Countdown

14th March has been officially designated Pi Day, a day for which we can celebrate the glorious number that starts with 3.14. Coincidentally, the 14th of March is also Albert Einstein’s birthday.

\(\pi\) -the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter- has been calculated to over one trillion decimal places. The record as far as I know belongs to Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo, who have calculated \(\pi\) to 10 trillion digits [1]. As an irrational and transcendental number, \(\pi\) will continue infinitely without any repetition or patterns emerging.

pi man
The “pi man” Larry Shaw

The first Pi Day was organized by Larry Shaw and held in San Francisco in 1988. In 2009, the US House of Representatives backed its official designation.

What to do for Pi Day?
Suggestions include bake a pie for Pi Day, or be artistic and write a piece of music, a poem or make a painting. You can find lots more suggestions by following this link.

The Welsh connection
The earliest known use of the symbol \(\pi\) to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is by Welsh mathematician William Jones FRS (1675 – 3 July 1749) in 1706 [2].

jones
Portrait of William Jones by William Hogarth, 1740 (National Portrait Gallery)

Jones was a close friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmund Halley. In November 1711 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was later its Vice-President.

References
[1] Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo, Round 2… 10 Trillion Digits of Pi 2013.

[2] William Jones, Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos, 1706.

Links
Pi Day

Wolfram MathWorld Pi

Wikipedia Pi

National Science and Engineering Week 2013

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National Science and Engineering Week 2013 in the UK is running from the 15th to the 24th March. The events are coordinated by the British Science Association, though it is other organisations and community groups that actualy run the events and activities. The theme this year is invention and discovery.

For those of you in the UK, follow the link below and get involved in something near you.

National Science & Engineering Week shines the spotlight each March on how the sciences, technology, engineering and maths relate to our everyday lives, and helps to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers with fun and participative events and activities.

Last year’s National Science and Engineering Week consisted of something like 500 events and activities from thousands of different organisers. More than 2 million people at schools, museums, universities, shopping centres, cafes etc. attended the various events.

Engineering Education Scheme Wales Awards & Presentation Day 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013 – 10:00 to 16:00
Celtic Manor Resort, Newport

Follow the link below for more details.

The British Science Association
The British Science Association is a registered charity that exists works to advance public understanding, accessibility and the accountability of the sciences and engineering in the UK.

Link
National Science and Engineering Week 2013

Engineering Education Scheme Wales Awards & Presentation Day 2013

How mathematical proofs are obtained.

Abstruse goose

The above cartoon from Abstruse Goose demonstrates the not always linear path of new discoveries in mathematics. How mathematics is discovered is not the same as how mathematics is presented.

This also reminds me of a very famous humorous quote:

mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that is proved is trivial!

Richard Feynman in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (contributor), Edward Hutchings (editor), 1985, W W Norton, ISBN 0-393-01921-7

Warsztaty Geometrii Różniczkowej talk

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I am giving a talk on Wednesday 6th of March as part of the Warsztaty Geometrii Różniczkowej (Workshop on Differential Geometry) here at IMPAN Warsaw. The title will be “Odd Jacobi manifolds and Jacobi algebroids”.

In the talk I will outline some of my work on odd Jacobi manifolds as well as their applications to odd contact geometry and Jacobi algebroids (a.k.a generalised Lie algebroids or Lie algebroids in the presence of a one-cocycle). The talk will be largely based on my paper “Odd Jacobi manifolds: general theory and applications to generalised Lie algebroids” Extracta Math. 27(1) (2012), 91-123.

Link
Seminars

Advancing women in mathematics: good practice in UK university departments

lms

The London Mathematical Societry launched its report Advancing women in mathematics: good practice in UK university departments at the House of Commons on 27th February.

The LMS is concerned about the loss of women from mathematics, particularly at the higher levels of research and teaching, and at the missed opportunities that this represents. Through its Women in Mathematics Committee it established a Good Practice Scheme and supporting departments participated in a benchmarking survey which led to this report.

http://lms.ac.uk/news-entry/26022013-1401/house-commons-launch-good-practice-report

The report is avaliable here (opend PDF)

Link
House of Commons Launch of Good Practice Report (LMS)

Random thoughts on mathematics, physics and more…