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The aim of the Hammers & Nails climate workshop was to give researchers at Perimeter a unique opportunity to interact with invited experts from diverse fields related to climate, energy and biodiversity. The first half of the workshop was dedicated to short research pitches, where both PI researchers as well as invited guests from the Math4Climate network (including e.g. Waterloo Center for Innovation and Complexity, UW's Climate Institute, Energy Institute, Water Institute) could present their hammers & nails. Nails refers to open challenges within climate, energy & biodiversity research. Hammers refers to methods used by PI researchers in their daily work (e.g. causal inference, techniques in algebraic topology, strong gravity simulations etc.). The second half of the workshop built on these pitches through informal group discussions. Conversations from the workshop may be continued in the future through informal lunches and reading groups.

Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has produced images of the black hole in the galaxy M87 and in the center of our galaxy, and I will briefly review what we have learned from the images.  In the near future we expect that repeated visits to M87, or high fidelity images of the galactic center, will produce movies of the turbulent plasma in these sources.  The statistical properties of the movies can be predicted using state-of-the-art numerical simulations.  I will explore what information can be extracted from the movies, especially information about source inclination and black hole spin.

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