Current Talks

This semester (Spring 25), the talks take place Wednesdays at 18:15 in the main building HG ETH, room HG G 3.

Click on the entries to see the abstracts and YouTube links (when available) !

Talk cancelled!

Date	Speaker	Title
02.04.	Alex Korocencev	Hoverboards—The Physics and Advancements of Magnetic Levitation
This talk explores the frontier of what is possible with magnetic levitation - how it works, its latest advancements, and where the technology is heading. While commonly associated with MagLev trains, magnetic levitation plays a key role in other fields, including helium pumps and renewable energy storage. A visually guided presentation will provide an intuitive understanding of the elegant mechanisms behind levitation and its expanding applications.
09.04.	Alexander Pietak	psit: A System to Compress Lagrangian Flows
As meteorological models grow in complexity, the volume of output data increases, making compression increasingly desirable. However, no specialized methods currently exist for compressing data in the Lagrangian frame. To address this gap, we developed psit, a pipeline for the lossy compression of Lagrangian flow data. In most cases, psit achieves performance that is equivalent or superior to non specialized alternatives, with compression errors behaving similar to measurement inaccuracies.
16.04.	Valentin Vogt	From Data to Discovery: How AI Finds the Few Variables That Control Everything
While physical systems might appear to be very complex, they are often governed by simple governing equations and just a handful of essential variables that scientists traditionally discover through painstaking observation. This talk explores how artificial intelligence can automatically identify these hidden governing variables directly from raw observational data like videos—without any prior knowledge of physics.
14.05.	Andrea Piccirilli	Is gravity just a hologram?...An introduction to gauge/gravity duality
In mathematics and theoretical physics, dualities are surprising connections between seemingly unrelated theories. One of the most striking examples is gauge-gravity duality, which suggests that a theory of gravity in a curved spacetime can be equivalent to a quantum field theory with no gravity at all living on its boundary. In this talk, I will introduce the AdS/CFT correspondence, a remarkable conjecture that first emerged from string theory and has since reshaped how we think about quantum gravity. No prior knowledge of general relativity, quantum field theory or string theory is required, just be ready to question the very nature of spacetime.
21.05.	Manish Prasad	Gravitational Waves: What They Are and How We Detect Them?
Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime caused by massive accelerating objects, predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. They open new windows into the universe, enabling discoveries in black hole mergers and neutron stars. Ground-based detectors like LIGO and future space missions like LISA are revolutionizing our understanding. In this talk, I will introduce gravitational waves and explore key aspects of their detection and scientific significance.
28.05.	Mae Eichenberger	Are we living in a simulation? A physics perspective on the simulation hypothesis.
Talk cancelled due to illness!

Past Talks

Click on the entries to see theYouTube links to the talks!

Date	Speaker	Title
08/10	Noel Friedrich	Oops, I accidentally made a Bitcoin Miner (How Bitcoin works)
15/10	Advait Dhingra	Studying the building blocks of nature in the Large Hadron Collider
22/10	Nils Assmus	Why your Rolex is crap - Frequency Metrology in the 21st Century
05/11	Luis Wirth	Lean4 and the Curry-Howard Isomorphism: The Deep Connection Between Logic and Programming Through Type Theory
12/11	Sergey Ermakov	Magnetic Reconnection - From basic plasma physics to novel computational methods
19/11	Giovanni Giorgis	Optimal Function Approximation with Deep Neural Networks: A Mathematical Perspective
26/11	Aparna Jeyakumar	A Leisurely Introduction to Simplicial Sets
03/12	Anna Bickel	Applying Physics to Medicine - Standardized Structure Naming: The Holy Grail of Radiation Therapy
10/12	Andrea Piccirilli	Deformation Quantization
17/12	Yannis Müller	What's the volume of an emoji, and… can I integrate that?

How to Give a Talk

Some useful information on how to give a talk:

• Keep it at most 30 minutes long!
• You can assume that the people listening to you have passed the Basisjahr, but we recommend still explaining as much as possible of the main concepts you are going to use in the talk. A good trade-off is always to ask people in the audience if they are familiar with the specific notions you are about to present, or to ask what they study and how far along they are in their studies. This way, you get a feeling for your crowd, and the audience also gets involved.
• Do not focus on technical details (Is this proof really necessary to go over for people to understand what the theorem tells us?)
• Try to tell a story to catch people's interest. You can also ask during the talk if people are still with you.
• Try to make it understandable for as many people as possible. Do you think someone will want to talk about the topic after the talk if they did not understand it?
• Last but not least, have fun and enjoy the stage!

I want to Give a Talk

Send us an email at clroth(at)ethz.ch with the following information:

1. Your full name and the talk name
2. Which department you are in and whether you are a bachelor’s or master’s student
3. A short abstract of the talk (a few sentences are enough so that people get the gist of the talk)
4. Preferred date of the talk
5. A signed consent form
6. (If you have an Instagram, you can send us your handle and we will link it)

If you don't know all the details yet, that's fine! You can just send us an email with the title and submit the abstract later.

About

ZUCCMAP is an acronym for Zurich Undergraduate Colloquium in Computational Science, Mathematics And Physics and is part of VMP (Verein der Mathematik-, Physik- und RW-Studierenden an der ETH).

We provide a platform for students to give informal, short talks on any topic of their choice within the realm of Mathematics, Physics and Computational Science —for instance, presenting their bachelor's or master’s thesis themes or just any other topic that sparks their interest. Although the topics of the talks are within these specific areas, everybody from ETH is welcome. The atmosphere during the talks is relaxed, with snacks and an apéro.

Current ZUCCMAP Committee (Spring 25)

• Marlo Clara Roth - president
• Raphael Caixeta - co-organizer
• Daniel Nádraský - co-organizer
• Pierre Pang - co-organizer
• Ian Wasser (GitHub) (Web Design)

If you are a motivated student and want to make ZUCCMAP even greater by becoming part of the committee, send Marlo an email to clroth(at)ethz.ch .

You can follow us on Instagram to stay up to date.

And don't forget to have a look at our Youtube channel with all the talks.