The Annual Collingwood Lecture

A generous bequest has allowed the department to institute an annual lecture in memory of Sir Edward Collingwood F.R.S. The lectures are given by mathematicians of international renown and are suitable for a general audience. We welcome visitors from other departments and from outside the university.

Edward Collingwood managed the family estate at Alnwick in Northumberland whilst simultaneously having a successful career as a research mathematician. He is probably known best for his work on the theory of Cluster Sets. He gave up a great deal of his time to medical administration and was, in addition, Chairman of the Council of Durham University from 1955 to his death in 1970. Collingwood College, Durham is named after him and the small research library in the department began from the nucleus of his books, collected works and journals. He was knighted in 1962, elected to the Royal Society in 1965 and became President of the London Mathematical Society in 1969.

The 2011/12 Collingwood Lecture

Professor A. O'Hagan (University of Sheffield)

"Masters of Uncertainty"

13 March 2012, 2.00pm, CLC203, The Calman Learning Centre

Abstract: "If we didn't have uncertainty, wouldn't everything be so much simpler? We could make decisions and never regret the consequences. The word 'risk' would disappear from our language. But life is not like that.

Uncertainty is everywhere.

Do not despair, though. Help is at hand. This talk will introduce you to the masters of uncertainty, the people whose whole professional life is spent dealing with, managing and minimising uncertainty. The statisticians.

The popular image of a statistician is of course completely different from the exotic and romantic picture I have just painted. According to that popular view, when a statistician is not busy concocting "lies, damned lies", he or she has one of the most boring of all jobs. Not so!

The job of the statistician is challenging, important and not at all like that stereotype. The statistician's raw material is not numbers but uncertainty.

And the statistician's skill with uncertainty is appreciated in all walks of life. This talk will have examples ranging over deciding whether the NHS should pay for an expensive new treatment, predicting major hurricanes (like Katrina), privatisation of the water industry and calculating the risk of dangerous global warming.

Nobody likes uncertainty. Except ... perhaps ... a statistician."

The first Collingwood Lecture was given in 1984 by Professor Christopher Zeeman F.R.S. on "The discovery of perspective during the Renaissance". A list of subsequent lectures is given below.

Academic Year	Date	Speaker	Institution	Title
10/11	25 Nov	Professor Robert S. MacKay, FRS	University of Warwick	The Mathematics of Emergence
09/10	6 May	Professor Sir John Ball, FRS	University of Oxford	Mathematics in the Public Eye: the story of Perelman and the Poincaré conjecture
08/09	7 May	Professor David Spiegelhalter, FRS	University of Cambridge	Understanding Risk and Uncertainty
07/08	23 Nov	Professor Vladimir Popov	Steklov Institute, Moscow	One and a half centuries of invariant theory
06/07	2 Mar	Professor Tony Sudbery	University of York	Alice and Bob in the quantum wonderland
05/06	10 Mar	Professor Frank Kelly	University of Cambridge	Traffic through Networks
04/05	15 Feb	Professor Vladimir Turaev	University of Strasbourg	Curves and Words
03/04	3 Nov	Professor Jon Keating	University of Bristol	Random Matrices and the Riemann Zeros
02/03	18 Feb	Professor Don B. Zagier	College de France/MPI Bonn	The Experimental Side of Number Theory
01/02	9 Nov	Professor GR Grimmett	University of Cambridge	Diffusion, Finance and Universality
99/00	11 Nov	Professor NS Manton, FRS	University of Cambridge	Are Particles Solitons
98/99	23 Nov	Sir Michael Atiyah, OM FRS	University of Edinburgh	The Icosahedron Past and Present
96/97	6 Dec	Professor KW Morton	University of Oxford	Can We Trust the Numbers We Get From Our Computers
95/96	5 Dec	Professor M Berry, FRS	University of Bristol	Quantum Mechanics, Chaos and the Prime Numbers
94/95	28 Nov	Professor PJ Green	University of Bristol	E is MC Squared: Inference by Throwing Dice
93/94	3 Dec	Dr WBR Lickorish	University of Cambridge	Knots in the Nineties
91/92	24 April	Professor R Penrose, FRS	University of Oxford	Magic Dodecahedra and the Mystery of Quantum Entanglement
90/91	26 Feb	Professor DV Lindley	University of Warwick	The Logical Analysis of Experimental Results (with Applications to Tea and Wine)
89/90	13 Mar	Professor JD Barrow	University of Sussex	Why is the Universe Mathematical?
88/89	25 Apr	Professor NH Kuiper	IHES, Paris	Convexity, Knots and Surfaces
87/88	14 Mar	Professor D Williams, FRS	University of Cambridge	Probability: Philosophy and Practice
86/87	24 Feb	Dr JS Bell	CERN, Geneva	No Action at a Distance?
85/86	13 Mar	Dr PM Neumann	University of Oxford	The Paris Grand Prix of 1860
84/85	18 Mar	Professor JH Conway, FRS	University of Cambridge	Cantor and the Infinite
83/84	3 May	Professor EC Zeeman, FRS	University of Warwick	The Discovery of Perspective during the Renaissance