Mathematics Research Seminar - Prof Katrin Wendland

The Mathematics Department, St Patrick's College, was delighted to host Prof. Dr. Katrin Wendland from University of Augsburg, Germany, as research visitor in early August. During her visit Prof. Wendland gave a seminar about special four dimensional manifolds called "K3 surfaces." The talk began with a beautiful presentation of Hamilton's contributions to the discovery of these spaces - in particular his study of the Fresnel wave surface which is related to special types of K3s called "Kummer surfaces." Prof. Wendland illustrated these difficult ideas very well with the use of simple colourful geometry involving spheres and pyramids.

The latter half of the talk was on Prof. Wendland's current research.
The exact nature of particles baffles scientists to this day. Some theories suggest that the powerful tools of modern geometry, such as mirror symmetry, K3 surfaces and Calabi-Yau manifolds, are a key
to unsolving this mystery. However it is difficult if not almost possible
to construct specific examples in this context. Recently Prof. Wendland has constructed a large class of examples of mirror symmetry using orbifold methods and Kummer K3 surfaces. These are expected to lead to greater insight into the quantum theory of particles.

Pictured are some of the attendees at the seminar. LtoR: Khalid Rashid (Pakistan), Maurice O'Reilly (Head of Maths Dept), Madeeha Khalid (SPD), Prof Katrin Wendland, Joost Slingerland (Maynooth) and Volkar Braun (DIAS).

The seminar was well attended by people from various institutions namely SPD, DCU, UCD and DIAS. The talk was followed by a discussion session.

Professor Wendland is a collaborator of Madeeha Khalid at SPD. Their current research is on Borcea-Voison Calabi-Yau three folds.

Last Updated: Wednesday August 19 2009