These talks will be self-contained presentations of mathematical concepts and theorems. They are intended to be accessible to all mathematics
students.  Coffee, tea and drinks will be provided.
 

The intuitive notion of curvature is pretty easy: circles are curved in an obvious way, and small circles are more curved than large ones. From this humble beginning, mathematicians go on to consider the curvature of any curve or surface, or of space itself. Unfortunately, the technicalities in doing this tend to swamp the intuition.

In this talk, we'll give a gentle introduction to the notion of curvature, keeping the intuition as much as possible. We'll discuss a Remarkable Theorem due to Gauss, and we'll talk about how space can be curved and how one might detect it.