The Adams Society, as one of the most active college societies, has run another successful year and organised a variety of academic talks as well as social events.

The year commenced with two Easter events after the exam’16: the Annual Garden Party and the Cricket Match with Trinity Mathematical Society. The Annual Garden in June was a great success, with a barbecue as usual (thanks to the great weather on the day and our chef Mr Peter Choy) alongside the Pimms, strawberries and croquet. We also battled the TMS in our traditional cricket match. Although we have shown our unyielding spirit of unity, we were narrowly defeated.

The Michaelmas term began with our Freshers’ squash to welcome both the freshers and old mathematicians back to the college. We had a busy term with four excellent talks: Dr Julia Gog talked about the hunting for viral packaging signals; starting from the “Entscheidungsproblem” (decision problem ) posted by Hilbert, Dr Anders Hansen also gave a talk on the computational mathematics; Dr Sebastian Andres introduced to students about some stimulating results on loop-erased random walks and the uniform spanning trees; Prof Gabriel Paternain described the mathematics behind the computerised tomography and the X-ray transform.

In Lent term, Dr Tom Fisher talked about some classical problems in number theory that lead to the study of elliptic curves; Dr Ulrich Sperhake spoke about the detection of gravitational waves and important topics about our present understanding of the laws and the history of our universe; Dr Oscar Randal-Williams gave a remarkable talk about the symmetries of manifolds; the last talk of the year was presented by Prof Adrian Kent on Quantum Theory and Cryptography. Finally, we are delighted to have Prof David Spiegelhalter, who is the president of the Royal Statistical Society, as the guest speaker at our Annual Dinner towards the end of Lent term.

I would like to thank the committee for their hard work and help to ensure that we had such a fruitful year, and also fellows, especially to Dr Dörrzapf and Dr Colwell, for their unrelenting support. Finally, I would like to wish the new committee all the best for the incoming year.

“ Make the Adams Society great as it always has been …”

Ziming Arthur Wang, President 2016-2017

You can view other Presidents’ reports here.