Blog: ‘My experience as an undergraduate at the British Mathematical Colloquium’

Anthony Laurence shares his thoughts on attending the principal cross-disciplinary pure mathematical conference in the UK, hosted in Cardiff for the 2026 edition.

As an undergraduate in Mathematics, attending a conference like the British Mathematical Colloquium (BMC) seems like it would only make concepts in class even more confusing! But I found the opposite - moments of confusion often resolved into unexpected clarity.

One example that kept coming up was seeing what happens when you relax assumptions in a theorem: the result shifts, sometimes dramatically, and suddenly you understand why the assumption was there in the first place.

This came through especially in the plenary talks. Professor de Filippis's talk on nonlinear potentials and Professor Varjú's on self-similar sets were both beautifully motivated.

In the PDEs section, talks from Megan Griffith-Pickering, Dr Yoldaş and Dr Katzourakis were particular highlights. In Dr Yoldaş’ talk, a paper titled The Landau Equation does not blow up was presented as part of the background research, where the Landau equation is an equation to model the movement of particles in a plasma - before this result it wasn’t certain that solutions were well-behaved!

Asking questions felt like the highest-stakes part of the week. But I noticed that the best questions weren't the ones that demonstrated knowledge - they were the ones that probed an edge, exposed a gap, pushed on an assumption. It turns out the mathematics being presented was doing this too.

I’m not sure if BMC will be my first and last, or my first of many conferences. But I certainly left with a much clearer understanding of what presenting mathematical research looks like and the sort of questions a researcher might ask.