Next Meeting
University of Cambridge - 7th May 2026
The next meeting of the COW is planned for Thursday 7th May at the University of Cambridge. The meeting will start at 1pm and finish at 5pm. All talks will take place in room MR3 in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
Speakers:- Jennifer Brown (Edinburgh)
- Michel van Garrel (Birmingham)
- Rachel Newton (King's College London)
For those who do not wish to attend the meeting in-person, we also plan to broadcast talks live using Microsoft Teams. Information about how to join the Teams meeting will be circulated to the COW mailing list the day before the meeting. If you would like to join the COW mailing list, instructions on how to do so may be found on the mailing lists page. If you would like to attend the meeting remotely but do not want to join the mailing list, please send an email to Alan Thompson (A.M.Thompson (at) lboro.ac.uk) requesting the meeting information.
Schedule
All talks will take place in room 140 in the Huxley Building.
| Time | Speaker | Title |
| 1:00pm | Rachel Newton | Relevant primes for the Brauer-Manin obstruction |
| 2:30pm | Michel van Garrel | A-model Fano correspondences as integral transforms of the intrinsic B-model |
| 4:00pm | Jennifer Brown | Quantum cluster coordinates from defects |
Funding and Travel Claims
The COW has some funding to cover travel expenses for UK-based PhD students and postdocs. The COW is currently funded by the Isaac Newton Institute and the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research under the UKRI/EPSRC Additional Funding Programme for Mathematical Sciences (EPSRC EP/V521917/1) and by the London Mathematical Society under a scheme 3 grant.
To ensure that we can fund as many participants as possible, we ask that participants purchase "advance" or "off-peak" train tickets where practical, and non-travel expenses (e.g. accommodation, food) cannot be covered. For those under the age of 30, we also recommend looking into getting a railcard, which can offer substantial savings on the cost of train travel around the UK. Information about how to submit a claim is available on the COW homepage here.
Abstracts
- Rachel Newton (King's College London) - Relevant primes for the Brauer-Manin obstruction
- I will introduce some local-global principles used in the study of rational points on algebraic varieties and describe how the Brauer—Manin obstruction can explain failures of these local-global principles. I will discuss which primes are relevant for the Brauer—Manin obstruction, in the sense that there is an element of the Brauer group with non-constant evaluation on p-adic points. I will present results from two collaborations: one with Martin Bright, and one with Emiliano Ambrosi and Margherita Pagano.
- Michel van Garrel (Birmingham) - A-model Fano correspondences as integral transforms of the intrinsic B-model
- Given a Fano variety X with smooth anticanonical divisor D, one may consider the enumerative geometry of X, of the pair (X,D) or of D. The study of how to go from counting genus 0 curves in X to genus 0 curves in (X,D) to genus 0 curves in D goes back to seminal work of Gathmann. While the A-model statements are fairly involved, they become as simple as it gets when formulated as B-model correspondences within the intrinsic mirror construction of Gross-Siebert - they are fairly standard integral transforms. My plan for the talk is to explain some of these results.
- Jennifer Brown (Edinburgh) - Quantum cluster coordinates from defects
- Character varieties depend on a topological space and a reductive group, but some constructions most naturally involve assigning different groups to different parts of the space. This can be done using defects, which form interfaces between the different theories. We'll focus on how this physical inspired story plays out for quantum cluster coordinates, using skein theory. This talk is based on works in collaboration with Matthias Vancraeynest, David Jordan, and Juan Ramòn Gòmez Garcìa.
This page is maintained by Alan Thompson and was last updated on 28/04/26. Please email comments and corrections to A.M.Thompson (at) lboro.ac.uk.