TYC Postgraduate Student Day 2023

Venue: Jeremy Bentham Room, Wilkins Building, University College London

TYC Postgraduate Student Day 2023 Share on X

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There will be 12 talks and almost 40 posters on display from across the four London TYC colleges, LSBU and Brunel, at the TYC Student Day.

This year coincides with the 250th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Young – there will be cake!  We are very pleased to welcome Andrew Robinson, author of Thomas Young: The Last Man Who Knew Everything.

Abstract: The blue plaque on Thomas Young’s house in central London labels him simply ‘Man of Science’, 1773-1829. There was no space to mention he was a physicist, physiologist and physician; a classicist, Egyptologist and philologist; and a prolific writer—probably the greatest polymath since Leonardo da Vinci. Young proved—contra Isaac Newton’s corpuscular theory of light—that light is a wave, through his inspirational ‘double-slit’ experiment; he also explained elasticity—the ratio between stress and strain in materials—through Young’s modulus. He revealed how the human eye focuses, perceives colours and suffers from astigmatism. As a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, he practiced medicine for three decades. He launched the decipherment of the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts on Egypt’s Rosetta Stone. He compared 400 languages and coined the term ‘Indo-European’. His numerous articles and books included more contributions to the Encyclopaedia Britannica than any other contributor in its history. This talk on his 250th birth anniversary will introduce his life and work, and consider why polymathy still matters in a world of specialization. For example, his physician’s investigation of vision triggered his fascination with the physics of light. Not long before his death, Young said: ‘It is probably best for mankind that the researches of some investigators should be conceived within a narrow compass, while others pass more rapidly through a more extensive sphere of research.’

(The Last Man Who Knew Everything. 2023 edition: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0344.)

We also welcome a team from Ab Initio Software Ltd. to discuss careers within their company, and who are generously sponsoring cash prizes for the ‘Best Talk’ and ‘Best Poster’ awards.

Ab Initio’s customers use our enterprise software platform to build applications that tackle the largest and most complex data processing challenges. These applications are some of the most complex operational and analytical systems in the world – mission critical applications with demanding performance requirements.  The characteristics of these applications include the processing of huge volumes of data (petabytes are not uncommon); low latency real-time applications; applications that dynamically reconfigure themselves based on their data and applications that scale as data volumes increase.

Ab Initio has grown through reference rather than marketing, so you may not have heard of us, but our customers are among the largest companies in the world in industries such as financial services, retail, telecommunications, transportation, healthcare and high tech.  We are headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and have offices all over the world. Our UK office is in Weybridge, Surrey.

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