UVic Café Scientifique | The weird, wiggly and wonderful world of topology - Mar. 12, 2025

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Imagine shapes that you can stretch and contort - but not fully break. The fascinating mathematical field of Topology is the study of shapes with this flexibility. Topologists get excited over silly-sounding questions like “how many holes does a straw have?”, but such questions can lead to many very cool applications to the real world that we will explore in this talk. For instance, suppose we scrumple up a map of Victoria. As long as we don’t rip the map, no matter how much we scrumple it there will always be one point that is exactly where it started. Weird! In this talk, we’re going to see a whole bunch of Dr. Bazett’s favourite math theorems and explore this wonderful world of topology.

Speaker: Trefor Bazett, Assistant Teaching Professor, Mathematics & Statistics