My chum the inimitable David Cushing has started a postgrad pure maths seminar at Newcastle. Because there are only a few pure postgrads here, he asked me to give a talk about the stuff I was looking at for the PhD I gave up on last year.

I’ve written a few posts here in the past about the Grzegorczyk hierarchy, computable groups, and so on, but I think this might be the first time I’ve presented my work to real people (apart from an impromptu hour-long braindump when one of the real seminar speakers cancelled and I decided to test my memory).

As usual, I wrote my slides using my deck.js template, which I’ve finally got round to putting on GitHub. I’ve uploaded the slides – you can see them here – but I thought I’d have a go at using my laptop to record the audio of the talk as well. Amazingly, the little built-in microphone picked up my voice quite clearly, and you can even just about hear the questions people asked.

We had a few discursions about tangential topics; maybe it’s good that the recording only picked up my attempts to draw everyone back to the maths.

At some point I’ll gather up the energy to have another go at finishing off the paper. For now, it’s in my phd-notes repository on github. Here’s a direct link to the PDF of the paper in progress.

Update 13/02/2013: The seminar organisers have set up a page with the schedule of talks.