CIRCA Seminar 30th October 1pm

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Tuesday 28 October 2025

There will be a CIRCA lunchtime seminar on Thursday 30th October at 1pm in Maths Lecture Theatre C.

Ruth Hoffmann and Rick Thomas will speak.

Ruth’s Title: Modelling Fitness Landscapes

Ruth’s Abstract: Fitness landscapes model the reproductive and survival success of genotypes, and are a central concept in evolutionary biology.

Mathematically, fitness landscapes can be abstracted into acyclic orientations of Boolean lattices with additional assumptions.

I will introduce the mathematical abstraction of fitness landscapes that we work with, and some of the current enumeration/structural conjectures that have come about from encoding fitness landscapes in Constraint Programming.

Rick’s Title: Syntactic monoids and groups

Rick’s Abstract: We will introduce the idea of the “syntactic monoid” of a language, focussing on the case where the syntactic monoid is a group. We will mention some connections with the notion of the “word problem” of a group.

Details on the University Events as follows:- Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra (CIRCA) seminar | Events