Venue
Join us at the iconic Wills Building, University of Bristol, for an inspiring conference within the cutting edge Fry Building home to the Department of Mathematical Sciences and Statistics. Discover innovation!
The University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a leading institution committed to innovation, academic excellence, and fostering reconciliation. Rooted in a historic yet vibrant city, it actively engages with its past while championing inclusion, and restorative justice. Join a forward-thinking community dedicated to creating a brighter, more inclusive future through education and research.
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Plenary sessions will be held in the University's iconic Wills Building, with parallel sessions held in the adjacent Fry Building
The Fry Building
The Fry Building is at the heart of the campus, just a short walk from Beacon House study centre and café, and close to Royal Fort Gardens and to the many other Schools in the University with which we interact. While the historic character of the Grade II listed building have been preserved, new additions include an atrium linking to a new 140-seat lecture theatre underneath a roof garden.
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The atrium integrates public art in the form of a Voronoi pattern. This Voronoi screen, which also acts as a brise-soleil, encloses what were originally external walls and has a large glass staircase from which you can enjoy spectacular views of the city.
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Voronoi diagrams were considered as early as 1644 by philosopher René Descartes and are named after the Russian mathematician Georgy Voronoi, who defined and studied the general n-dimensional case in 1908.
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Voronoi diagrams have numerous applications across mathematics, as well as in various other disciplines, such as modelling animal territories or crystal growth. In the 1854 London cholera epidemic, physician John Snow used a Voronoi diagram created from the locations of water pumps, counting the deaths in each polygon to identify a particular pump as the source of the infection.
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Early in his career, Bristol’s Professor Peter Green devised an algorithm to compute Voronoi diagrams efficiently, which can be applied to very large sets of points. The paper has been cited over 1000 times, by researchers in the analysis of spatial data, for spatial interpolation and smoothing, image registration, digital terrain modelling, epidemic and ecological modelling, in material science, geographical information systems, and in many other areas of science and technology. You can read his paper for more information: Computing Dirichlet tessellations in the plane (with R. Sibson), Computer Journal, 21, 168–173 (1978).