Week 13.03.2023 – 19.03.2023

“Special” geometries, such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, play a central role in multiple areas of string theory, as well as gravitational theories more generally. The goal of these lectures is to introduce some of the formalism and tools useful for characterising such geometries, pitched at the level of a starting PhD student. We will start with purely geometrical backgrounds using the general notions of a G-structure and special holonomy and then will go on to describe backgrounds that also have non-trivial fluxes. We will be guided by applications to string phenomenology and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Please visit https://lonti.weebly.com/spring-2023-series.html for more information.

Abstract: In this talk, I will outline how I went from solving Killing spinor equations with pen and paper to a career in coding-intensive Data Science. I'll talk about my experience of working as a Data Scientist for Tesco and how leaving academia didn't mean the end of doing research for me.

Bio: Sebastian completed his PhD in Theoretical Physics at King's in 2019. He then transitioned from the less big data-driven classification of SUGRA backgrounds to a career in computationally heavy machine learning. Since 2020, he's been working as a (by now) Senior Data Scientist at Tesco where he mainly works within the Price Optimisation space and looks after collaborations with academia.