Oxford: Maths Garden Party

Two years ago we went to a Maths Garden Party where after a fascinating lecture by OCIAM (the Oxford Centre for Industrial & Applied Maths) who are doing very interesting work on in mathematical modelling cell growth and cancer drug treatments ("Chemotherapeutical Drugs to Solid Tumours"). This work is commerical financed and I think tis link with business and people outside their sphere excellence has probably meant that they have become accustomed to explaining their work. Isabelle and Nadjib (who both studied Philosophy at Aix-En Provence) really enjoyed the talk.

Unfortunately this years talk, regarding logic and lattice theory was "less accessible", to be honest despite having had done a small amount of research before the lecture, I didn't really understand much (and I did do Maths at Oxford). Nadjib was very disappointed:

In mathematics, especially order theory, a partially ordered set (or poset) formalizes the intuitive concept of an ordering, sequencing, or arrangement of the elements of a set. A poset consists of a set together with a binary relation that describes, for certain pairs of elements in the set, the requirement that one of the elements must precede the other. However, a partially ordered set differs from a total order in that some pairs of elements may not be related to each other in this way. A finite poset can be visualized through its Hasse diagram, which depicts the ordering relation between certain pairs of elements and allows one to reconstruct the whole partial order structure.

A familiar real-life example of a partially ordered set is a collection of people ordered by genealogical descendancy. Some pairs of people bear the ancestor-descendant relationship, but other pairs bear no such relationship.

The garden party afterwards was very nice though, we meet a mathemtican who happy to talk about Data Mining, the realitive strengths and weakness of SQL Server and Oracle, in particular MVCC:

Multiversion concurrency control (abbreviated MCC or MVCC), in the database field of computer science, is a concurrency control method commonly used by database management systems to provide concurrent access to the database.

MVCC provides each user connected to the database with a "snapshot" of the database for that person to work with. Any changes made will not be seen by other users of the database until the transaction has been committed.