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

Café Scientifique is an initiative from UVic’s Faculty of Science that bridges the research-to-public gap with casual community lectures inspired by the early coffeehouses of 18th century France. These free evening cafés provide an opportunity to learn about exciting new discoveries in modern science and meet experts in the field. Each event begins with a 45 minute talk followed by a moderated question and answer session.