A/Prof Teruhisa Tsuda from Hitotsubashi University, Japan will give a talk on Wednesday 17th September at 2pm in Carslaw 829 (AGR). All welcome! TITLE: Hermite-Pade approximation, isomonodromic deformation and hypergeometric integral ABSTRACT: In 19th century, Hermite studied two different types of rational approximation problems for a tuple of functions. We show that a certain duality between two approximations leads to the Schlesinger transformations, i.e. transformations of a linear differential equation shifting its characteristic exponents by integers while keeping its monodromy invariant. We also discuss how they benefits studying Painleve equations; in particular, we present their solutions written by means of iterated hypergeometric integrals. This talk is based on a joint work with Toshiyuki Mano.