Prof. Martin Hairer gave a lecture titled “Taming infinities” at AMSS on August 13, 2015.

In his talk, some physical and mathematical theories have the unfortunate feature that if one takes them at face value, many quantities of interest appear to be infinite. Various techniques, usually going under the common name of “renormalisation” have been developed over the years to address this, allowing mathematicians and physicists to tame these infinities. They will tip our toes into some of the mathematical aspects of these techniques and they will see how they have recently been used to make precise analytical statements about the solutions of some equations whose meaning was not even clear until now.

Prof. Martin Hairer Department of Mathematics, from the University of Warwick, was awarded a Fields Medal in 2014 for his outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations, and in particular created a theory of regularity structures for such equations.