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Congratulations to Nick Trefethen of the Computing Laboratory's Numerical Analysis Group on his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society; also to Richard Ward of the University of Durham. Richard did his DPhil at the Institute under Roger Penrose, and was a JRF at Merton from 1977 to 1978.

It is very pleasing news that Raoul Bott has been elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. In the past, he was a frequent visitor to Michael Atiyah's group at the Institute.

Dr Bernd Kirchheim of the University of Oxford was awarded a Whitehead Prize for his fundamental work in several areas of real analysis. His results in geometric measure theory include a proof that rectifiable metric spaces have density one, a metric differentiation theorem, and a surprisingly powerful extension with Ambrosio of the Federer-Fleming theory of currents to general metric spaces. His results in the calculus of variations include a proof that the quasiconvex envelope of a continuously differentiable function remains continuously differentiable and a complete solution to the problem of existence of non-trivial Lipschitz self-maps of the plane whose gradients attain only finitely many values.

Marcus du Sautoy has been awarded a literary prize in Italy, the Peano Prize 2005 for the most readable book about mathematics published in Italian. Previous recipients have included Alain Connes and Keith Devlin.

Marcus du Sautoy has been awarded a Senior Media Fellowship from the EPSRC. The fellowship will run for three years starting in October 2005. The aim of the fellowship is to continue the Institute's outreach activity by promoting mathematics on radio, TV and through the print media.

Frances Kirwan has been awarded an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship for five years, starting at Easter 2005. (The EPSRC usually awards three such fellowships each year in engineering and the physical sciences). She will be working on a research project in algebraic geometry, studying moduli spaces of complex algebraic curves.

Roger Penrose was given an honorary degree by the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) on 2 October 2004.

Roger Penrose received the (first) Amaldi Prize by the Italian Society for Relativity and Gravitation on 13 Sept, 2004

Terence John Lyons, Wallis Professor of Mathematics, St. Anne's College, University of Oxford was named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The induction ceremony took place July 28, 2004 at the IMS Annual Meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

Professor Lyons received the award for fundamental contributions to analysis and probability, ranging from those of a purely geometric character to applications in financial management.

The prize for the best short talk in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Student 2004 Symposium on a graduate research project was awarded to Katerina Kaouri, OCIAM, for her talk "Modelling Sonic Boom".

David Acheson has been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship worth £50,000 in recognition of 'his outstanding contribution to learning and teaching'. He plans to use the award to attempt a breakthrough in the communication of mathematics, particularly to students who are about to start at university.