LMS General Meeting and Celebration of Kelvin's 200th Anniversary (in partnership with BSHM and University of Glasgow)

LMS General Meeting and Celebration of Kelvin's 200th Anniversary

This event marks the 200th Anniversary of Lord Kelvin's birth on 26 June 1824. The lectures are aimed at a general mathematical audience. All interested, both members and non-members of the LMS and BSHM, are most welcome to attend this event.

The event is run in partnership between the London Mathematical Society (LMS), the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) and the University of Glasgow.

Programme (all timings are in BST)

Abstracts

Mark McCartney (Ulster University)
Ever in haste

William Thomson (1824-1907) was one of the most important natural philosophers of the nineteenth century. He was energetic and wide-ranging in his interests contributing to areas as diverse as tide prediction, telegraphy, and the age of the earth. This talk will seek to give a broad overview of Thomson's life and work, beginning in a Georgian house in Belfast and ending in Westminster Abbey.

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Luke K. Davis (University College London)
If you cannot measure it, you cannot control it: Active matter under thermodynamic control

William Thomson, later known as Lord Kelvin, was one of the most precocious and brilliant minds of the 19th century. Amongst his prodigious achievements in problem solving in science at an early age and his more industrially oriented innovations, including the mirror galvanometer, it was his insights into the nature of heat that, to me, stand most high. In Thomson's lifetime, when the laws of thermodynamics were only starting to emerge, thanks in part to Thomson himself, the question whether living systems could be subject to these same laws was hardly, if ever, asked. Indeed, everything, even life, is subject to the laws of thermodynamics though living systems, and those far from equilibrium which physicists like to call "active", have presented challenges to existing thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Here, I will spend some time talking about Thomson and his role in thermodynamics and then I will share my recent work on the thermodynamic control of active matter. The title is an adaptation of a quote widely attributed to Thomson: If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

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Ruiping Mu (Northwest University)
Thomson and Stokes’ work on the Establishment of the Dynamical Equation and its Associated Proofs

Describing the state of motion of a fluid by building dynamical equations was an important goal in the early history of fluid dynamics. Based on the foundation of hydrostatic studies by Bernoulli, D’Alembert, Euler, Lagrange and others, Poisson, Cauchy, Thomson, Stokes and others gave relatively complete equations in fluid dynamics and, importantly, they proved important theorems on the conditions under which the dynamical equations are integrable. Their further refinement of the fundamental equations of fluid dynamics given by Euler laid the foundations for nineteenth-century British research in fluid dynamics centred on Stokes. Tracing the mathematical approach to the thought of the trio of Poisson, Cauchy, and Thomson, Stokes helps us to better understand the process of perception and application of mathematical knowledge from the late 18th to the 19th century.

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Rosalba Garcia-Millan (Kings College London)
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and field theory in active matter

Active matter transforms fuel into mechanical action at the local, microscopic scale. Living organisms, such as swimming bacteria and growing cell tissue, provide plenty of examples of active systems. Celebrating Lord Kelvin’s legacy, I will talk about how studying active matter is useful to develop our understanding of life. In particular, I will discuss current open questions on quantifying entropy production and extracting work from active matter. Since active matter involves fluctuations, many interacting degrees of freedom, persistence and strong correlations, at the core of these questions lies the need for new mathematical tools to study them. I will outline how I use field theory to tackle some of these challenges.

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Jemma Lorenat (Pitzer College)
An illustrated history of drawing knots

For the past two centuries knot theory has presented a novel site on which to explore a variety of "aids to the imagination.'' This talk surveys complementary ways of seeing (or obscuring) knot features for purposes of representation, calculation, and identification. While some symbolic practices remained confined to a single author, others persist until today. I will begin with Lord Kelvin's 1867 paper before turning to research on knot tabulations and the diagrams that accompanied this work.

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Joe Goddard (UC San Diego)
William Thomson and Thermoelectricity

In this talk, I propose to review the main results from some relatively recent publications, casting Thomson’s equilibrium theory into a modern form, hopefully more transparent, citing proponents of Thomson and Onsager while noting the amusing incoherence of some renowned scientists who have adopted Onsager’s theory, and, finally, mentioning a possible connection of Onsager’s dissipational symmetry to the symmetries of equilibrium thermodynamics arising from Maxwellian symmetry of cross derivatives. Full abstract available here.

Registration

• To attend online, please complete the registration form here.
   
• Registration for in person attendance and for the Society Dinner has now closed.

Accessibility

The building currently has stepped access only to the raised ground floor and lower ground floor entrances.

An accessible toilet is located at the lower ground floor level.

Please see the LMS website for further details on accessibility