Distinguished Visitor

Imre Leader is a Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. His research work has concentrated on Graph Theory and Combinatorics particularly in isoperimetric inequalities, extremal Combinatorics and Ramsey Theory.

Educated at St Paul’s School (1976 – 1980) and Trinity College, Cambridge (1981 – 1989), he was a member of the British team in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1981: he later led the team from 1999 to 2001 (and is still heavily involved with Olympiad training). He was also the Chief Coordinator and Problems Group Chairman for IMO 2002.

He was a Fellow at Peterhouse (Cambridge) 1989-1996, Reader in Mathematics, University College London from 1996-2000, Lecturer in Pure Mathematics, Cambridge 2000-2002 and Reader in Pure Mathematics, Cambridge from 2002-2005. He was also awarded Whitehead Prize of London Mathematical Society in 1999. He obtained his PhD in 1989, supervised by Béla Bollobás. He is currently a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

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Events

SMS Teacher’s Workshop

How to mark hard questions

How should one approach the marking of a script from a student that is about a hard problem? How does this differ from marking a ‘rote’ or ‘routine’ question like an A-level question? What are the right kinds of comments to make on the script, to help the student?

We will consider these issues, and will illustrate with plenty of examples.

SMS Public Lecture

Think of a Number

In the game of ‘How rich am I?’, each player has one minute to write down on a piece of paper the biggest number he can. The winner is the person with the bigger number. What are some good strategies for this game?

This is a topic that is extremely open-ended. It is suitable for discussion with all ages of pupil, from 11 or 12 right through to 18 (and even to university students). It is always great fun, even though there are important mathematical points to be made.

SMS Academic Talk

Partition Regular Equations

A finite or infinite matrix M is called `partition regular’ if whenever the natural numbers are finitely coloured there exists a monochromatic vector x with Mx=0. Many of the classical results of Ramsey theory, such as van der Waerden’s theorem or Schur’s theorem, may be naturally rephrased as assertions that certain matrices are partition regular.

While the structure of finite partition regular matrices is well understood, little is known in the infinite case. In this talk we will review some known results and then proceed to some recent developments.

The talk will not assume any previous knowledge of the area.

Registration

Please click on the following links to register your attendance.

Teacher’s Workshop 
Public Lecture 
Academic Talk

Deadline for registration: To be confirmed

Coordinator

Dr Ng Kah Loon
Tel: 65162751
Email: matngkl@nus.edu.sg