Visiting Edinburgh's Universities

I began my day today with a colloquim at Edinburgh University, King's Buildings Campus, in the James Clerk Maxwell building.  While searching their site over the last few months I found this colloquium in a series titled GAMES: General Audience Maths Edinburgh Seminar.

Cool!  A math talk for a general audience!

I felt drawn to attend a talk at Edinburgh University since so many of the luminary mathematicians and mathematical physicists that I am studying spent time as professors here or as students here, so it just seemed cool to me to be there taking in a lecture.

The topic, which hadn't been announced until very recently, was "The Asymptotics of the Gamma Function Via Resurgence."

Yeah - bit of a stretch, that -

Here are a couple of slides from the talk, and I'll put the abstract at the bottom of this post for those who are interested.

Clearly when they advertise a presentation for a general audience it is quite different from what I mean when I give a presentation for a general audience!!

After the seminar I headed to Edinburgh Napier University, Merchiston Campus to see what remains of John Napier's castle home which the college is built around.

I'm including quite a number of pictures of Napier Tower, as for a long time this was the single thing that was bringing me to Edinburgh to seek out the history of mathematics - fascinating man, Napier, but more on him in another post.

from the back

detail of the top of the building - I love the door in the tower

Then I took another swing past Edinburgh University's main campus and also another past Edinburgh University's New College (which is on "The Mound" very close to Edinburgh Castle).

EU Main Campus

EU Main Campus

EU New College

EU New College

EU New College

OK, before posting the abstract of the talk I attended this morning I am going to post some of the flowers blooming on The King's Building campus - spring in Edinburgh.

Abstract: This talk will be about the divergent asymptotic expansion of the gamma function. The divergence of this asymptotic expansion is caused by the singularities of its Borel transform. We exploit these singularities to obtain explicit formulae for the coefficients and remainder term of the asymptotic expansion of the gamma function. These formulae then will be used to obtain realistic error bounds for the asymptotics of the gamma function. All related concepts will be explained during the talk.