The Shape of Knots: From DNA to Shoestrings and Solar Flares

lectures london lectures

Find free to attend lectures from leading universities and institutions around London

Calender Github

Tuesday

Aug 26

08:30

The future of sustainability

SDGs and beyond

Tuesday

Sep 2

17:00

Black holes, neutron stars and gravitational waves: from a whisper to a symphony

Thursday

Sep 4

15:00

Crick Lecture | Michelle Monje

Sovereign Debt Management Strategies for Colombia’s Climate and Biodiversity Transition

16:00

Information Session: Postgraduate Certificate in Neurodiversity Coaching

Monday

Sep 8

17:00

Wildlife, Warriors and Women: Big Cat Conservation in Tanzania and Beyond

Tuesday

Sep 9

16:00

Automation Anxiety

18:00

The Final Frontier: Black Holes in the Infant Universe

Wednesday

Sep 10

12:00

Let’s bring Spectral Flow Cytometry to Dunn School!

16:00

Physics Inaugural Lecture

16:45

Fuellers Annual Energy Lecture – A Roadmap to Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)

Thursday

Sep 11

11:00

Athena Swan Lecture 2025

15:00

Crick Lecture | Dimitrios Anastasiou

16:00

Earth – Our Planetary Life Support System

Friday

Sep 12

00:00

Open Cambridge 2025

Tuesday

Sep 16

16:00

The Shape of Hands: Symmetry, Chirality and Handedness

16:30

Professor Jaime Delgadillo - Inaugural Lecture

Wednesday

Sep 17

11:00

Workshop 2: Impact of Fertility Treatment on Birkbeck Staff - A Discussion

16:00

The Great God Pan: Lord of the Wild

17:00

Authoritarian Legacies and Popular Support for State Violence: A Multi-Method Analysis of the Philippine Case

Thursday

Sep 18

15:00

Crick Lecture | Veronica Kinsler

16:00

Lessons from Guantánamo Bay

17:30

BSL Tour of 1880 THAT with Peter Brown

Ecologies of Violence: A Conversation

Friday

Sep 19

10:00

Promoting Immigrant Belonging and Well-Being Across National and Cultural Contexts

14:30

Global inequality in historical and comparative perspective

Monday

Sep 22

08:00

UK-South Korea Research Partnership on Engineering Biology Webinar: Microbial Chassis

17:00

Investing in our future: COP30 and the sustainable growth agenda

Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies

Tuesday

Sep 23

12:00

Current understanding of visual snow syndrome

15:00

Bernal Lecture 2025: The Harvest of an eclectic Mind: Alan Mackay and the Rewriting of the Book of Crystallography

16:00

AI Will Be Your Overlord: Faster, Brighter, Better Than You?

17:30

Valuing nature in a changing climate: rethinking natural capital

Wednesday

Sep 24

16:30

Hornsby’s legacy: Laying the foundations of Astronomy in Oxford

17:00

How It Ends: What We Know about the Fate of the Universe

17:30

Climate finance and investment in low-income countries

Thursday

Sep 25

07:30

'Breakfast with Birkbeck' Environment & Sustainability Webinar #8

15:00

Crick Lecture | Shalin Naik

16:00

Going for Gold: the Mathematics of Sporting Glory - Amandine Aftalion

17:00

Professor Hammond's Inaugural Lecture - From the Seychelles to North Korea: Imaging the Earth One Piece at a Time

Friday

Sep 26

10:00

Bad Language

Tuesday

Sep 30

16:00

Hitler, Jesus & How to Win a Culture War

17:30

How AI is helping - and harming - animals

Wednesday

Oct 1

16:00

Why Do We Fear?

16:30

To eat or not to eat? Navigating risk for eating disorders for young people

17:30

ASSEMBLE: Building Collective

Racism and racial justice: 40 years on from the Broadwater Farm riots

Thursday

Oct 2

12:05

Elmore String Quartet

16:00

Evoking Empathy through Animal Portraiture

17:30

The Insular Condition: Architecture, Modernism and Politics in the Caribbean

Can human solidarity survive social media and what if it can’t?

Friday

Oct 3

11:00

Judges in Dialogue: Intellectual Property Law

17:00

Book talk - The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

Saturday

Oct 4

10:00

Personal Statement Workshop

Monday

Oct 6

17:00

Avvocato Francesco Gianni: Is there a future for international trade law?

17:30

Depopulation: an ethical perspective

Tuesday

Oct 7

13:00

What is justice?

17:30

The crime of war: from the Nuremberg trial to Ukraine

Wednesday

Oct 8

11:00

Virtual Open Day for Foundation, Intermediate and Diploma Programmes

16:00

How Does Mathematics Last? Heritage and Heritage-making in Mathematics

17:30

The promise and peril of Trump's America first

Thursday

Oct 9

17:00

Black Atlantic: power, people, resistance

Friday

Oct 10

09:00

In-Person Open Day

10:00

The Word for World

Tuesday

Oct 14

16:00

War's Toxic Legacy

Wednesday

Oct 15

11:00

China and Chineseness: Lessons from the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan

16:30

Problem solving: from the clinic to the classroom

17:30

Inaugural Lecture with Professor Ewan McGaughey

Thursday

Oct 16

16:00

From Tyranny to Athenian Democracy

17:00

Direct Effect in EU Law

17:30

An Evening with Baroness Shami Chakrabarti: in conversation with Professor David Latchman CBE

Friday

Oct 17

09:00

Remembering Joseph Rykwert

16:00

New ways of working (and what that means for us as humans)

Saturday

Oct 18

17:30

Cities on the frontline: urban governance in the age of the polycrisis?

Tuesday

Oct 21

14:00

Strachey Lecture: Advances in Garbled Circuits

15:00

Cicely Saunders International Annual Lecture 2025

16:00

Whither War; Whither the Law of War

Wednesday

Oct 22

11:30

1884, an anticolonial game-theatre show

16:30

Building mathematical Lego

17:00

Scholars' Library: Jaz Brisack on 'Get on the Job and Organize'

Thursday

Oct 23

17:30

Almost Nothing But Blue Ground - a performative Lecture with Tom Pope and Matthew Benington

Friday

Oct 24

17:30

The 2025 Mark Cousins Annual Lecture

Monday

Oct 27

18:00

The Economics of Work and Technology

Wednesday

Oct 29

18:00

Music of Animals

Thursday

Oct 30

17:30

Under pressure: smarter trials for better health outcomes

18:00

Ocean: The Liquid Engine That Dominates Our Planet

Monday

Nov 3

18:00

China’s Economic Prospects on the Cusp

Tuesday

Nov 4

18:00

The Master’s Book Club: Prof. Sharon Peacock CBE FMedSci in conversation with Prof. Tim Minshall author of ‘Your Life is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters, and How We Can Do It Better'

Minor Criminal: The Trial of the Man Who Murdered My Grandmother

Wednesday

Nov 5

12:00

Virtual Open Day for Taught Postgraduate Programmes

13:00

Do Not Resuscitate Forms - Who’d Have One?

17:30

The Bioengineering Caro Alumni Lecture with Ingeborg Oie

18:00

Limitarianism and Capitalism

Thursday

Nov 6

13:00

How Women Made the Global Economy

Tuesday

Nov 11

18:00

The Shape of Plants: Why Plants Love Mathematics and Mathematicians Love Plants

Wednesday

Nov 12

18:00

Why Do We Laugh?

Monday

Nov 17

18:00

The Later Years: Organisation, Independence and Peace of Mind

Inaugural Lecture with Professor James Lee

Wednesday

Nov 19

18:00

Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences Annual Graduate Lecture 2025 - Stories at the Edge of Empire: Newfoundland, 1763-1829

Tuesday

Nov 25

17:00

Scholars' Library: Robert McGill on 'Simple Creatures'

18:00

Becoming AI – Your Journey to Assimilation?

Wednesday

Nov 26

18:00

Hecate: Mistress of Magic

Thursday

Nov 27

13:00

Where Is China Heading under Xi Jinping?

18:00

Society and Survival During the Holocaust

Friday

Nov 28

18:00

Centre of European Law 51st Annual Lecture

Monday

Dec 1

18:00

Photobiography

Wednesday

Dec 3

19:00

From Mars with Love: Postcards from 50 Years of Exploring The Red Planet

Thursday

Dec 4

14:30

The Year Ahead at the Ashmolean, with Xa Sturgis

18:00

Donald Trump and the Death Penalty

Wednesday

Dec 10

14:00

Doing Social Justice Research Now

18:00

Life, Death and Judgement in the Art and Times of Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516)

Monday

Dec 15

19:00

The Nutcracker’s Musical Magic

Tuesday

Jan 13

18:00

Economics and Artificial Intelligence

Wednesday

Jan 14

18:00

Music of Light and Colour

Tuesday

Jan 20

18:00

Constable's "The Cornfield": A Bicentenary Harvesting

Wednesday

Jan 21

18:00

Why Do We Grieve?

Thursday

Jan 22

18:00

Oligarchs and Their Discontents

Monday

Jan 26

19:00

Alice’s Adventures in Musical Adaptation

Tuesday

Jan 27

18:00

The Shape of Shells: She Sells Self-Similar Spiral Seashells on the Seashore

Wednesday

Jan 28

18:00

Mithras: Master of Mystery

Thursday

Jan 29

18:00

An Ocean of Air

Tuesday

Feb 3

18:00

Will You Be AI’s Pet?

Wednesday

Feb 4

19:00

Alien Earths: What Makes Us Special?

Thursday

Feb 5

18:00

Death Investigation: What Do Coroners Do?

Tuesday

Feb 10

18:00

Lee Miller's Indelible Images

Tuesday

Feb 17

18:00

The Price of Pixels: Unmasking the Environmental Impact of Our Digital Lives

Thursday

Feb 19

18:00

The Ground We Stand On

Tuesday

Feb 24

18:00

Work, Out of Reach

Wednesday

Feb 25

18:00

Music of Earth and Space

Tuesday

Mar 3

18:00

The Shape of Gravity: Why On Earth Are Planets Spherical?

Wednesday

Mar 4

18:00

Why Do We Hate?

Tuesday

Mar 10

18:00

Bridget: Goddess and Saint

Thursday

Mar 12

18:00

The Death of Athenian Democracy?

Tuesday

Mar 17

18:00

Born Supremacy – AI as a Pale Shadow of Real Humanity

Wednesday

Mar 18

19:00

The Universe’s 100th Birthday: Galactic Fireworks and Little Red Dots

Monday

Mar 23

18:00

A Living Planet

Monday

Apr 13

16:00

The Annual Lady Mayor's Lecture

Tuesday

Apr 14

16:00

A World Without Work

Wednesday

Apr 15

16:00

Music of the Mind

Tuesday

Apr 21

16:00

Taming AI

Wednesday

Apr 22

16:00

Why Do We Love?

Tuesday

Apr 28

16:00

The Shape of Tiles: Regular and Irregular, Hard and Soft

Wednesday

Apr 29

17:00

The Sky at Night, Tonight: A New View of the Changing Sky

Tuesday

May 5

16:00

Music, Death and Afterlife

Wednesday

May 6

16:00

Dionysus: Lord of Misrule

Monday

May 11

16:00

The Annual LMS Lecture 2026

Tuesday

May 12

16:00

The Pill and the Planet: Can We Have Both a Healthy Aging Population and a Sustainable Future?

Wednesday

May 13

16:00

Music of the Body

Monday

May 18

17:00

Happily Ever After? Singing and Dancing Cinderella

Wednesday

May 20

16:00

Should We Manipulate People’s Emotions?

Thursday

May 21

16:00

The White Knight: Ice

Tuesday

May 26

16:00

Education – And Its Limits

Thursday

May 28

16:00

Plato to Polybius on Constitutional Change

Tuesday

Jun 2

16:00

Forging Better Futures for You and AI

Wednesday

Jun 3

17:00

Pluto Isn’t a Planet

Tuesday

Jun 9

16:00

The Shape of Knots: From DNA to Shoestrings and Solar Flares

Wednesday

Jun 10

16:00

Music of Sleep and Dreams

Thursday

Jun 11

16:00

Cicero In and On Political Crises

Monday

Jun 15

16:00

The Annual Gray's Inn Reading 2026

Wednesday

Jun 17

16:00

The Morrigan: The Nightmare Queen

Thursday

Jun 18

16:00

The Death of the Roman Republic?

Tuesday

Jun 23

16:00

The Annual Sir Thomas Gresham Lecture 2026

Wednesday

Sep 16

13:00

Scholars' Library: Dr Brian Wong on 'Moral Debt'

end

The Shape of Knots: From DNA to Shoestrings and Solar Flares

Gresham College

June 9

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Event link calender

Knots are ubiquitous in the world around us, appearing as tangled cords, shoelaces, or the complex structures of DNA. Far from being nuisances, knots have profound and beautiful mathematical properties with tentacular connections to geometry, topology, physics, and biology. This lecture introduces the fascinating world of knot theory, exploring how the mathematical study of knots helps us understand and predict their formation, stability, and behaviour.