Tuesday march 12th, the education committee of A–Eskwadraat is organising anouther pub lecture! Have you always wanted to see teachers in a pub? Do you want to follow a lecture together with your favorite drink? The presenting teachers are:

Alessandro Grelli - Math, physics, computing, and engineering meet at CERN 

The European Center for nuclear research (CERN) is a unique endeavor of human race. Several member states joined forces to build a mega facility for the study of nature. In this talk we will discuss how curiosity driven math and theoretical investigations motivated the realization of the largest machine every build. We will review the engineering and computing advances it is generating and how this advance will be important for society. Finally, we will see how the Netherlands contributes to this endeavor and the future plans with special attention on Utrecht group involvement.

Alvaro del Pino Gomez - How to chop a space into pieces

A topologist is someone that studies the shape of spaces and, very concretely, tries to detect whether a space may have "holes". There are many tools and approaches to this, but in this talk I will explain the idea behind a technique that is particularly fun, called Morse theory.The starting point of Morse theory is that one can use functions to "chop a space into levels". The idea is that once the chopping is done, one can go back and reconstruct the shape of the space from the knowledge we have about the levels. A good example to keep in mind is how we use PET scans in order to study the brain layer by layer. I will explain this using many pictures and I will try to give a flavour of what some of the major contributions in the field have been.