The Adams Society enjoyed another successful year, with many traditional, in-person activities being resumed after the pandemic. We welcomed a larger audience across the university to our talks and social events.

The Michaelmas term began with a St John’s College favourite – Professor Richard Samworth (FRS) – who spoke about Stein’s Lemma and some of its consequences. Later Professor Kevin Buzzard from Imperial gave a very popular talk on formal proof verification titled ‘Can a computer do your problem sheets?’. By the end of term we had Professor Niranjan Balachandran (IIT Bombay), who talked about the Szemeredi Regularity Lemma.

Subsequent talks in Lent term explored topics in Number Theory, delivered by Professor Tom Fisher from Cambridge, Professor Gerd Faltings (Fields Medalist 1986) from the University of Bonn, and Dr Vicky Neale from Oxford. The first two talks focused on Diophantine equations while the last one was about the relationship between scarves she knitted and the roots of polynomials.

On the social front, the garden party in Easter and the Fresher’s Squash in Michaelmas announced the comeback of our post-covid events, albeit under some restrictions. The Annual Dinner was the highlight of the year as always, with Dr Ivan Smith as our guest speaker. On the other hand, there was unfortunately some bad news (by the law of conservation of good news): we narrowly lost the Annual Cricket Match to the Trinity Maths Society and the football match to St Catherine Hyperbolics.

I’d like to thank the committee for their work throughout the year, and our DoSes and fellows for their support. I believe the Adams Society is on an upward trajectory to embrace its centenary birth next year, and the best of luck to our new president Vishal.

Xuanang Chen
President 2021-22

You can view previous reports here.