Rothschild Public Lecture: The Shape of Data and Social Justice

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• Michael Hill (University of Minnesota)
• Tuesday 27 May 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.

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EHT - Equivariant homotopy theory in context

An old joke is that a topologist cannot tell the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut, since both of these are objects with just one hole. The goal of topology in mathematics is to describe ways to tell shapes and more general spaces apart, and algebraic topology works to do so using quantities like the number of pieces or the number of holes. Underlying this is a fundamental question: what features depend only on the space and what features depend on how we happen to be looking at the space?   We have an intuitive understanding of what the number of pieces means, and for things we run into in nature, we have an sense for what “number of holes” means. Over the last 120 years, mathematicians have worked to make this intuition precise and figure out ways to assign quantities like the number of holes to more complicated situations. I will describe some of this history, then I will focus on how these tools are being used to help understand data and to address questions of social justice.

This talk is part of the Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series series.

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