Registration is now open. If you would like to register please email one of the organisers (Alex Clark adc20@mcs.le.ac.uk, Uwe Grimm u.g.grimm@open.ac.uk or John Hunton jrh7@mcs.le.ac.uk), saying which days you would like to come for, whether you would like to volunteer a talk, whether you wish to book accommodation (available at the University Halls of Residence for approximately £39 per night) and whether you wish to apply for any financial support.

Titles & Abstracts 

Workshop Schedule

A workshop on Aperiodic Order was be held at the University of Leicester from Monday 7 to Friday 11 September, 2009. 

Aperiodic Order is the study of non-repeating but highly structured patterns in, typically, Euclidean or Hyperbolic space. Examples of such aperiodic phenomena studied in mathematics can be found centuries back, but the modern era started in the early 1960's when Wang and Berger showed that the question of whether given sets of tiles in Rd could tile the whole of Rd was, in general, undecidable; this implied the existence of sets of tiles that could tile Euclidean space but only aperiodically. A flurry of examples followed, including Penrose's now famous tilings, while systematic constructions subsequently led to uncountable families of examples in all dimensions.

The discovery of quasicrystals in the early 1980's showed that such supposedly exotic mathematical patterns actually occurred in nature, adding impetus to their mathematical study and sparked scientific activities across a number of disciplines. Mathematical topics such as topological dynamics, algebraic topology and noncommutative geometry have provided key tools and insights for understanding both the mathematics and the physical realisations of aperiodic patterns. In an exciting recent development, important links have now been discovered between aperiodic tilings and the structure and evolution of viruses.

The workshop mainly concentrated on mathematical questions following from the current physical and biological problems, together with new interactions between classical topics in dynamics, geometry and the theory of buildings in the context of aperiodic order. To accomplish this, the daily programme typically involved invited talks in the morning and last thing in the afternoon, with structured time in the afternoon for group work and talks participants requested or volunteered as a result of the activities, as they developed.The workshop was organised by Alex Clark (adc20@mcs.le.ac.uk) and John Hunton (jrh7@mcs.le.ac.uk) and Uwe Grimm (U.G.Grimm@open.ac.uk).