On Friday 29 April, David Lloyd has been invited to give the Mathematics Colloquium at George Mason University in Virginia. The title of his talk is “Snakes on the plane: From Alan Turing to modern theories of localised pattern formation“. It will take place at 4:30pm local time (9:30pm in the UK), and the zoom link is provided on the Colloquium webpage (link here). In the talk, Dave will start with the University of Surrey’s link to Alan Turing and provide an introduction to the mathematics of pattern formation, and show that fully localised patches of cellular pattern occur readily in applications. Concentrating on an experiment involving a magnetic fluid, he will show how one can provide a partial mathematical explanation for the formation of localised spots and patches of various cellular patterns. Finally, he will present a heuristic argument to compute the pattern selection of these patches and discuss how these results apply to other systems. The image below shows the Mathematics Building at GMU.