Society Lecture Research Articles

Meeting reports

A total of 90 scientists from a range of disciplines came together in Madrid over 21–23 September 2022, to discuss the vibrant field of plant proteostasis. Topics covered included ubiquitination, autophagy, vesicle trafficking, proteostasis and stress, quality control and organellar proteostatic systems. High points included excellent student and early career researcher talks (with a large dose of Spanish flair!) and inspirational keynotes from Helen Walden (University of Glasgow, UK; Biochemical Society Lecture) and Tim Clausen (Research Institute of Molecular Pathology Vienna, Austria; EMBO Lecture) who showcased how state-of-the-art structural biology has informed ubiquitination mechanisms influencing human disease. No protein complex is too big to tackle!Marion Clavel (Gregor Mendel Institute, Vienna, Austria) won the best talk prize with her presentation on the role of selective autophagy in promoting plant survival during virus infection, and the poster winner was Marissa Y. Annis (Cornell University, Ithaca, USA) on Uvr2 and Uvr3 proteins as novel candidate regulators of chloroplast Clp system activity with a potential role in stress response.Overall, the meeting was notable for the extremely high quality of science and a strong sense of community. The meeting is accompanied by a special issue of Essays in Biochemistry on plant proteostasis.

Some remarks on oscillation inequalities

AbstractIn this paper, we establish uniform oscillation estimates on $L^p(X)$ with $p\in (1,\infty )$ for the polynomial ergodic averages. This result contributes to a certain problem about uniform oscillation bounds for ergodic averages formulated by Rosenblatt and Wierdl in the early 1990s [Pointwise ergodic theorems via harmonic analysis. Proceedings of Conference on Ergodic Theory (Alexandria, Egypt, 1993) (London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes, 205). Eds. K. Petersen and I. Salama. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 3–151]. We also give a slightly different proof of the uniform oscillation inequality of Jones, Kaufman, Rosenblatt, and Wierdl for bounded martingales [Oscillation in ergodic theory. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys.18(4) (1998), 889–935]. Finally, we show that oscillations, in contrast to jump inequalities, cannot be seen as an endpoint for r-variation inequalities.

Analog reducibility

Abstract In this paper we introduce and characterize two ‘analog reducibility’ notions for $[0,1]$-valued oracles on $\omega $ obtained by applying the syntactic characterizations of Turing and enumeration reducibility in terms of (positive) relatively $\varSigma _1$ and $\varPi _1$ formulas to formulas in continuous logic (Ben Yaacov, Berenstein, Henson and Usvyatsov, 2008, Model Theory for Metric Structures, vol. 2 of London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, pp. 315–427. Cambridge University Press.). The resulting analog and analog enumeration degree structures, $\mathscr {D}_a$ and $\mathscr {D}_{ae}$, naturally extend $\mathscr {D}_T$ and $\mathscr {D}_e$ in a compatible way. To show that these extensions are proper we prove that a sufficiently generic total $[0,1]$-valued oracle does not ‘analog enumerate’ any non-c.e. discrete set and that a sufficiently generic positive $[0,1]$-valued oracle neither ‘analog enumerates’ a non-c.e. discrete set nor ‘analog computes’ a non-trivial total $[0,1]$-valued oracle. We also provide a characterization of the continuous degrees among $\mathscr {D}_{ae}$ as precisely $\mathscr {D}_e \cap \mathscr {D}_a$. Finally we characterize a generalization of r.i.c.e. relations to metric structures via $\varSigma _1$ formulas in the ‘hereditarily compact superstructure’, which was the original motivation for the concepts in this paper.

Hyperbolic groups with finitely presented subgroups not of Type $$F_3$$

We build on the constructions in Brady (J Lond Math Soc 60(2):461–480, 1999) and Lodha (A hyperbolic group with a finitely presented subgroup that is not of type FP3, London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 67–81, 2017) to give infinite families of hyperbolic groups, each having a finitely presented subgroup that is not of type $$F_3$$ . By calculating the Euler characteristic of the hyperbolic groups constructed, we prove that infinitely many of them are pairwise non isomorphic. We further show that the first of these constructions cannot be generalised to dimensions higher than 3.

Angelika Amon.

Angelika Amon.

Внесок Ю. А. Кулаковського в розвиток античної археології в Історичному товаристві Нестора Літописця

In the history of Ukrainian archeology there are many names of outstanding researchers who have devoted their lives to the study of our antiquity. Among them – Yulian Kulakovskyi, a well-known domestic historian and archeologist. For many years of his life he devoted to the scientific and pedagogical activity at the Kyiv University of St. Vladimir, where he had worked at the Faculty of History and Philology. After moving to Kyiv, Yu. A. Kulakovskyi began interesting in the late Ancient Christian archeology of the Crimea. In 1883 Yu. A. Kulakovskyi had joined the Nestor Chronicler Historical Society. Since that time, his life and career have been closely linked to this scientific union. For many years he represented the Nestor Chronicler Society at the All-Russian Archaeological Congresses. In 1905, for his extraordinary merits, Yu. A. Kulakovskyi was admitted to the Honorary Members of the Society, and from 1907 to 1911 performed the duties of its President. Kulakovskyi's presidency was one of the most productive periods of the Society's activity, meetings and public lectures were held during which scientific reports were read. The fascination of Yu. A. Kulakovskyi with archeology began after his move to Kyiv. For many years he was an active participant in archaeological research in the outskirts of Kerch, near Mithridat mountain. The results of these studies have been dedicated to a series of reports published on the pages of “Readings in the Nestor Chronicler Historical Society”. It is possible to consider that he initiated the direction of research in the field of Late Antique archeology of the Crimea in the Society. For the first time in the history of Bosporan archeology, the researcher not only conducted excavations of the most valuable early Christian funeral sites, but he also explored much of the necropolis, discovered unique burial sites, some of them are known for their wall paintings. Thanks to the efforts of the scientist it was possible to solve important questions of the borders of the ancient necropolis, chronology and cultural identity of the ancient population of Crimea. The researches of Yu. A. Kulakovskyi made it possible to begin systematic excavations of the ancient Panticapeus, which allowed to preserve the unique archaeological materials, which later became the subject of careful study of modern scientists.

Impressions of Japan Health Physics Society Lecture, “Domestic Trend about Incorporating ICRP Recommendations”

Impressions of Japan Health Physics Society Lecture, “Domestic Trend about Incorporating ICRP Recommendations”

Non-triviality of the Poisson boundary of random walks on the group of Monod

We give sufficient conditions for the non-triviality of the Poisson boundary of random walks on $H(\mathbb{Z})$ and its subgroups. The group $H(\mathbb{Z})$ is the group of piecewise projective homeomorphisms over the integers defined by Monod [Groups of piecewise projective homeomorphisms. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA110(12) (2013), 4524–4527]. For a finitely generated subgroup $H$ of $H(\mathbb{Z})$, we prove that either $H$ is solvable or every measure on $H$ with finite first moment that generates it as a semigroup has non-trivial Poisson boundary. In particular, we prove the non-triviality of the Poisson boundary of measures on Thompson’s group $F$ that generate it as a semigroup and have finite first moment, which answers a question by Kaimanovich [Thompson’s group $F$ is not Liouville. Groups, Graphs and Random Walks (London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series). Eds. T. Ceccherini-Silberstein, M. Salvatori and E. Sava-Huss. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017, pp. 300–342, 7.A].

“Each Punishment Should Be a Fable”: Punitive Analytics, The Punitive-City Diagram, and Punishment as Technology of Power in Foucault’s Works of the 1970s and 1980s

Michel Foucault’s Punitive Society lectures make clear that, for him, punishment presents a critical problem. On the one hand, Foucault struggles to develop a conceptual vocabulary adequate to punishment, and particularly to the prison-form as a penal development. On the other hand, the Punitive Society lectures clearly indicate the stakes of punishment. How, Foucault asks, might punishment focalize relations of power? How might it serve as a field of struggle? What does a punitive technology of power look like, if it exists? Indeed, across numerous works from the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault traces the varying place of penalties within penal and punitive tactics, showing how punishment reciprocates historical relations of power and problems of power. Yet it remains necessary to develop Foucault’s account of punishment, which is never formalized. In this paper, I develop punishment as a polyvalent technology. Foucauldian punishment may be an analytic, a technology, and—in the allegorical “punitive city” from Discipline and Punish—a diagram of power. I argue that Foucauldian punitive power seizes the body in the name of an authority or a reified power to subordinate individuals to that authority, and with an objective to correct the individual’s relation to a multiplicity. It operates “above,” at the level of, and in “fragments” of embodied individuals. Further, with Foucault’s account of the “punitive city,” we find a theoretical model in whichpunishment becomes the ordering force of the social, and therein a diagram of punitive power exerted in extensive form across the social field.

On the Lang–Trotter conjecture for two elliptic curves

Following Lang and Trotter, we describe a probabilistic model that predicts the distribution of primes p with given Frobenius traces at p for two fixed elliptic curves over $$\mathbb {Q}$$ . In addition, we propose explicit Euler product representations for the constant in the predicted asymptotic formula and describe in detail the universal component of this constant. A new feature is that in some cases the $$\ell $$ -adic limits determining the $$\ell $$ -factors of the universal constant, unlike the Lang–Trotter conjecture for a single elliptic curve, do not stabilize. We also prove the conjecture on average over a family of elliptic curves, which extends the main results of Fouvry and Murty (Supersingular primes common to two elliptic curves, number theory (Paris, 1992), London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, vol 215, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995) and Akbary et al. (Acta Arith 111(3):239–268, 2004), following the work of David et al. (Math Ann 368(1–2):685–752, 2017).

POKING ITS NOSE INTO EVERYTHING—THE SOCIETY FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF ARTS, MANUFACTURES AND COMMERCE

The Society was said ‘to poke its nose into everything’ and this can be seen from the awards it made across a wide spectrum of activities, including the discovery of cobalt in the United Kingdom, mapping of English counties, improved methods of extracting the ore, assaying, reclaiming land, mining equipment, improving crucibles and portable furnaces. The Society also laid the groundwork for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and organized the second exhibition at South Kensington in 1862. From the mid-nineteenth century the Society's lecture program represented the wide range of its activities, including mineralogy and geology. This paper provides a brief overview on the work of the Society, its influence worldwide, and also highlights some individuals with a particular interest in mineralogy and geology, connected with the Society, including one of the founding members of the Geological Society of London, Arthur Aikin.

The unipotent modules of $${{\mathrm {GL}}}_{n}({{\mathbb {F}}}_{q})$$ GL n ( F q ) via tableaux

We construct the irreducible unipotent modules of the finite general linear groups from actions on tableaux. Our approach is analogous to that of James (Bull Lond Math Soc 8:229–232, 1976) for the symmetric groups, answering an open question as to whether such a construction exists. We show that our modules are isomorphic to those previously constructed by James (Representations of general linear groups, London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, vol. 94. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511661921) , although the two presentations are quite different. Key to our construction are the generalized Gelfand–Graev representations of Kawanaka (Generalized Gel’fand-Graev representations and Ennola duality. In: Algebraic groups and related topics (Kyoto/Nagoya, 1983), advanced studies in pure math., vol. 6, pp. 175–206. North-Holland, Amsterdam 1985).

Affine quantum Schur algebras at roots of unity

Finite dimensional irreducible modules for the affine quantum Schur algebra [Formula: see text] were classified in [B. Deng, J. Du and Q. Fu, A Double Hall Algebra Approach to Affine Quantum Schur–Weyl Theory, London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, Vol. 401 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012), Chapt. 4] when [Formula: see text] is not a root of unity. We will classify finite-dimensional irreducible modules for affine quantum Schur algebras at roots of unity and generalize [J. A. Green, Polynomial Representations of [Formula: see text] , 2nd edn., with an appendix on Schensted correspondence and Littelmann paths by K. Erdmann, J. A. Green and M. Schocker, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 830 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2007), (6.5f) and (6.5g)] to the affine case in this paper.

Statute Law Society Lecture, November 2016: A View from the Crossbenches

It is an honour for me to have been invited once again to deliver a lecture to the Statute Law Society. I can look back to the early years when the late Lord Renton laid down the foundations for the Society and to the work of the late Lord Rodger who took up the reins when Lord Renton had to pass on the work to someone else. I recall how much time and dedication Alan Rodger gave to the task which he had taken on. It was a task that was dear to his heart, which is why he took his responsibilities so seriously. He had learned much about how statutes were put together from his time as Solicitor General for Scotland and then as Lord Advocate, when he was the minister having...

The smooth surfaces in ℙ4 with few apparent triple points

We classify smooth complex projective surfaces in [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text] apparent triple points, thus recovering and extending the results of Ascione [Sulle superficie immerse in un [Formula: see text], le cui trisecanti costituiscono complessi di [Formula: see text] ordine, Atti Accad. Naz. Lincei Rend. Cl. Sci. Fis. Mat. Natur.[Formula: see text]5[Formula: see text] 6 (1897) 162–169] and Severi [Intorno ai punti doppi impropri di una superficie generale dello spazio a quattro dimensioni, e a’ suoi punti tripli apparenti, Rend. Circ. Mat. Palermo 15 (1901) 33–51] for [Formula: see text], Marletta [Le superficie generali dell’ [Formula: see text] dotate di due punti tripli apparenti, Rend. Circ. Mat. Palermo 34 (1912) 179–186] for [Formula: see text], and Aure [The smooth surfaces in [Formula: see text] without apparent triple points, Duke Math. J. 57 (1988) 423–430] for [Formula: see text]. This is done thanks to a new projective character that can be introduced as a consequence of the main result of [K. Ranestad, On smooth plane curve fibrations in [Formula: see text], in Geometry of Complex Projective Varieties, Sem. Conf., Vol. 9 (Mediterranean, 1993), pp. 243–255; J. C. Sierra and A. L. Tironi, Some remarks on surfaces in [Formula: see text] containing a family of plane curves, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 209 (2007) 361–369; V. Beorchia and G. Sacchiero, Surfaces in [Formula: see text] with a family of plane curves, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 213 (2009) 1750–1755]. Going a bit further, we obtain some bounds on the Euler characteristic [Formula: see text] in terms of the degree [Formula: see text] and the sectional genus [Formula: see text] of a smooth surface in [Formula: see text]. For [Formula: see text], these bounds were first obtained in [A. B. Aure and K. Ranestad, The smooth surfaces of degree [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text], in Complex Projective Geometry, London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, Vol. 179 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992), pp. 32–46; K. Ranestad, On smooth surfaces of degree [Formula: see text] in the projective fourspace, Ph.D. thesis, Oslo (1988); S. Popescu, On smooth surfaces of degree [Formula: see text] in the projective fourspace, Dissertation, Saarbrücken (1993)]. Here we give a different argument based on liaison that works also for [Formula: see text] and that allows us to determine the triples [Formula: see text] of the smooth surfaces with [Formula: see text] apparent triple points.

The International Byron Societies 2014–2015

BYRON SOCIETY OF AMERICAThe Byron Society of America has had an active year. We recently sponsored panels at several major conferences. At the 2014 convention of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) in Atlanta, Georgia, on 8 November, Lindsey Eckert (Georgia State) chaired a panel entitled 'Creating and Sustaining Byron', which included papers by Jeffery Vail (Boston), Samantha Crain (San Jose State), and Michael Jones (Connecticut). The BSA's panel at 2015 Modern Languages Association convention (Vancouver, BC, 10 January) was entitled 'Byron Now', organised by Matthew Borushko (Stonehill). It featured papers by Jerome McGann (Virginia), Evan Gottlieb (Oregon State), and Gary Dyer (Cleveland State), the full texts of which are available on the BSA homepage (http:// byronsociety.org) under 'Events' and 'MLA Convention Sessions'. At the 2015 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) conference in Winnipeg in August, Alexander Grammatikos (Carelton) organised the BSA's panel 'Lord Byron and Rights'. Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge (Massachusetts), Mark Lounibos (Finlandia), and Jacob Hughes (Penn State) presented papers.Charles E. Robinson (Delaware) delivered the Society's tenth Leslie Marchand Memorial Lecture at CUNY Graduate Center on 13 March 2015, under the title 'Byron and Hazlitt: Inclining Their Ears Towards Each Other', based on his forthcoming edition of Hazlitt's letters. More recently, Julia Markus (Hofstra) gave the eleventh Marchand lecture, ' Celebrating Lady Byron's Life and Ada Lovelace's Day', on 16 October 2015, at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus, an event co-sponsored by the NY Romantic Group under the leadership of John Bugg (Fordham). This talk was given to celebrate the publication of Professor Markus's new biography, Lady Byron and Her Daughters (W.W. Norton), which appeared in October. Professor Markus will also lecture on her book at DePaul University in Chicago on 9 November, 6pm at Arts and Letters Hall, in an event co-sponsored by the DePaul Humanities Center and the Honors Program.In 2015, Michael Edson (Wyoming) edited a collection in honour of the University of Delaware's Donald H. Reiman, entitled Publishing, Editing, and Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman (Delaware, August 2015), available from Rowan and Littlefield. Contributors include: B.C. Barker-Benfield, Nora Crook, Stuart Curran, Hermione de Almeida, Doucet Devin Fischer, Neil Fraistat, David Greetham, Steven E. Jones, Alice Levine, Michael J. Neth, Michael O'Neill, Charles E. Robinson, and Timothy Webb.2015 also saw the publication of Nature, Politics, and the Arts: Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring (University of Delaware Press, 2015), edited by Hermione de Almeida. The book includes John Clubbe's 'The Eroica in its Artistic Context: Willibrord Joseph Mahler's Portrait of Beethoven', 'Dark Humor, Cartoon Strips, and Other Raw Material for Don Juan', by Hermione de Almeida, 'American Wilderness', by Carl Woodring, and afterwords by Nina Auerbach, G. Thomas Tanselle, William Theodore de Bary, Donald H. Reiman, Anne K. Mellor, Carl Dawson, Marsha Manns, Regina Hewitt, Robert M. Ryan, and William Carl Gilpin.This year, the BSA funded student travel to the International Association of Byron Society's annual conference, held in Gdansk, Poland (3-6 July), and to the graduate student conference in Messolonghi, Greece (22-27 May, 2015). Grant recipients for Poland included Peter Francev (Mount San Antonio College); grant recipients for Messolonghi included Alexander Grammatikos (Carleton University), Samantha Crain (San Jose State University) and Alex Anderl (DePaul).In 2016, Noah Comet (US Naval Academy) will moderate the BSA's panel at MLA 2016 (Austin, TX, 8 January), 'Byron and America', at which he will also present a paper alongside Matt Sandler (Columbia), William Keach (Brown) and Susan Wolfson (Princeton).In May 2016, in collaboration with the Keats-Shelley Association of America, the BSA will co-sponsor a one-day symposium at the New York Public Library devoted to the bicentennial of the Geneva Summer. …

List Colorings with Distinct List Sizes, the Case of Complete Bipartite Graphs

AbstractLet be a function on the vertex set of the graph . The graph G is f‐choosable if for every collection of lists with list sizes specified by f there is a proper coloring using colors from the lists. The sum choice number, , is the minimum of , over all functions f such that G is f‐choosable. It is known (Alon, Surveys in Combinatorics, 1993 (Keele), London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, Vol. 187, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 1–33, Random Struct Algor 16 (2000), 364–368) that if G has average degree d, then the usual choice number is at least , so they grow simultaneously. In this article, we show that can be bounded while the minimum degree . Our main tool is to give tight estimates for the sum choice number of the unbalanced complete bipartite graph .

Well-posedness and qualitative behaviour of a semi-linear parabolic Cauchy problem arising from a generic model for fractional-order autocatalysis.

In this paper, we examine a semi-linear parabolic Cauchy problem with non-Lipschitz nonlinearity which arises as a generic form in a significant number of applications. Specifically, we obtain a well-posedness result and examine the qualitative structure of the solution in detail. The standard classical approach to establishing well-posedness is precluded owing to the lack of Lipschitz continuity for the nonlinearity. Here, existence and uniqueness of solutions is established via the recently developed generic approach to this class of problem (Meyer & Needham 2015 The Cauchy problem for non-Lipschitz semi-linear parabolic partial differential equations. London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, vol. 419) which examines the difference of the maximal and minimal solutions to the problem. From this uniqueness result, the approach of Meyer & Needham allows for development of a comparison result which is then used to exhibit global continuous dependence of solutions to the problem on a suitable initial dataset. The comparison and continuous dependence results obtained here are novel to this class of problem. This class of problem arises specifically in the study of a one-step autocatalytic reaction, which is schematically given by A→B at rate apbq (where a and b are the concentrations of A and B, respectively, with 0<p,q<1) and well-posedness for this problem has been lacking up to the present.

The Geoffrey Binnie Lecture 2014: The heritage of dams in Northern Ireland

The Geoffrey Binnie Lecture is the British Dam Society's keynote lecture, presented biannually at the BDS conference. The 2014 lecture was presented prior to the conference dinner on Thursday 4 September in Belfast. The paper reviews the role played by impoundments in Northern Ireland from early times and considers a selection of the approximately 150 reservoirs, all of which will soon become subject to specific safety legislation. It refers to some of the challenges faced by early designers and builders, and to some improvements that have been necessary in the interest of safety. These include works to various publicly owned reservoirs between 1972 and 1990 in anticipation of the likely extension of legislation to Northern Ireland, similar to that which applies to the rest of the UK. In particular, it recognises the vision and achievement of the designers, builders and custodians whose dams form their legacy to the long-term benefit of society.

The Meryon Society Lecture at the 38th Oxford Muscle Symposium, June 28th 2013: The story of the distal myopathies

Most textbooks refer to Gowers as the neurologist who described the first patient with distal myopathy 1902 [1]. This is true in the sense of using the term distal myopathy in a scientific report, but in fact, patients with distal myopathy had been described already in the late 19th century [2]. These early reports are in retrospect difficult to evaluate whether the described patients had a myopathic distal neuromuscular disorder or something else. Accordingly, the case described by Gowers has been questioned in later publications.