Helen Byrne and Benjamin Walker recognised by the Society for Mathematical Biology

Oxford Mathematicians Helen Byrne and Benjamin Walker are among the recipients of the Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB)'s 2021 Awards for established mathematical biologists.

Helen becomes a Fellow of the Society, a programme that honours members of the Society who are recognised by the scientific and scholarly community as distinguished contributors to the discipline and also contributors to the Society. This honour will be bestowed at the SMB annual meeting in Riverside in 2021.

Ben has been awarded the H. D. Landahl Mathematical Biophysics Award. This Award recognises a graduate student who is making outstanding scientific contributions to mathematical biology during doctoral studies. Ben is being honored for outstanding contributions modelling flagella and Leishmania and numerical analysis of swimming, and also for his future as a bright leader in the field.  He will receive a certificate at the SMB Ceremony at the Annual Meeting.

 

Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page. Created on 14 May 2020 - 18:55.

Oxford Mathematician Ehud Hrushovski elected Fellow of the Royal Society

Congratulations to Oxford Mathematician Ehud Hrushovski who has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). Ehud is Merton Professor of Mathematical Logic at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He studied in the University of California, Berkeley, and worked in Princeton, Rutgers, MIT and Paris and for twenty five years at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before coming to Oxford.

Ehud's work is concerned with mapping the interactions and interpretations among different mathematical worlds. Guided by the model theory of Robinson, Shelah and Zilber, he investigated mathematical areas including highly symmetric finite structures, differential equations, difference equations and their relations to arithmetic geometry and the Frobenius maps, aspects of additive combinatorics, motivic integration, valued fields and non-archimedean geometry. In some cases, notably approximate subgroups and geometric Mordell-Lang, the metatheory had impact within the field itself, and led to a lasting involvement of model theorists in the area. He also took part in the creation of geometric stability and simplicity theory in finite dimensions, and in establishing the role of definable groups within first order model theory. He has co-authored papers with 45 collaborators and has received a number of awards including the Karp, Erdős and Rothschild prizes and the 2019 Heinz Hopf prize.  

Oxford Mathematics now has 27 Fellows of the Royal Society among its current and retired members: John Ball, Bryan Birch, Martin Bridson, Philip Candelas, Marcus du Sautoy, Artur Ekert, Alison Etheridge, Ian Grant, Ben Green, Roger Heath-Brown, Nigel Hitchin, Ioan James, Dominic Joyce, Jon Keating, Frances Kirwan, Terry Lyons, Philip Maini, Jim Murray, John Ockendon, Roger Penrose, Jonathan Pila, Graeme Segal, Martin Taylor, Ulrike Tillmann, Nick Trefethen, Andrew Wiles, and Ehud himself of course.

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Konstantin Ardakov awarded the 2020 Adams Prize

Oxford Mathematician Konstantin Ardakov has been awarded the 2020 Adams Prize. The Adams Prize is awarded jointly each year by the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge and St John’s College, Cambridge to UK-based researchers, under the age of 40, doing first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences. This year’s topic was “Algebra”, and the prize has been awarded jointly to Konstantin and Michael Wemyss (University of Glasgow).

Professor Mihalis Dafermos, Chair of the Adams Prize Adjudicators, said: "Prof Ardakov has made substantial contributions to noncommutative Iwasawa theory, and to the p-adic representation theory of p-adic Lie groups. In a long-term collaboration with Simon Wadsley, he has developed a p-adic analogue of the classical theory of D-modules, of significance both in representation theory and to the local Langlands program.

The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John’s College, Cambridge. It is currently worth approximately £15,000. It commemorates Adams’s role in the discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.

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Oxford Mathematicians win 2019 PNAS Cozzarelli Prize

Oxford Mathematicians Derek Moulton and Alain Goriely together with their colleague Régis Chirat (University of Lyon) have won the 2019 PNAS Cozzarelli Prize in the Engineering and Applied Sciences category for their paper 'Mechanics unlocks the morphogenetic puzzle of interlocking bivalved shells.'

The paper describes how two groups of animals—brachiopods and bivalve mollusks—sport interlocking shells that help guard against predators and environmental perturbations, and explains how those shells are formed.

The Cozzarelli Prize is awarded annually to six research teams whose PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) articles have made outstanding contributions to their fields. Each team represents one of the six classes of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page. Created on 11 Mar 2020 - 10:14.

Anna Seigal awarded 2020 SIAM Richard C. DiPrima Prize

Anna Seigal, one of Oxford Mathematics's Hooke Fellows and a Junior Research Fellow at The Queen's College, has been awarded the 2020 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Richard C. DiPrima Prize. The prize recognises an early career researcher in applied mathematics and is based on their doctoral dissertation. 

Anna's research interests lie in tensors and multilinear algebra, applied algebraic geometry and algebraic statistics, and their connections to machine learning, numerical analysis, optimization, and computational biology.

She will receive the award at the SIAM Annual Meeting in July in Toronto.

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Nick Woodhouse appointed CBE in 2020 New Year Honours List

Professor Nick Woodhouse, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics in Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, former Head of the Mathematical Institute and previously President of the Clay Mathematics Institute has been appointed CBE in the 2020 New Year Honours List for services to mathematics.

Nick has had a distinguished career as both a researcher and a leading administrator in the University. His research has been at the interface between mathematics and physics, initially in relativity, and later in more general connections between geometry and physical theory, notably via twistor theory.  In parallel he led the Mathematical Institute in Oxford at a time of major expansion and was the leading figure in the Institute's move to the Andrew Wiles Building, completed in 2013. His time as President of the Clay Mathematics Institute saw its profile and influence increase and its roster of talented Clay Research Fellows grow.

Nick also played a leading role in the administration of the wider University including a period as Deputy Head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division; and was a member of the North Commission set up in 1997 to review the management and structure of the collegiate University and whose recomendations helped shape Oxford as it operates in 2020.

Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page. Created on 27 Dec 2019 - 23:50.

James Maynard awarded the 2020 Cole Prize in Number Theory

Oxford Mathematician James Maynard has been awarded the 2020 Cole Prize in Number Theory by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) "for his many contributions to prime number theory."

James is one of the leading lights in world mathematics, having made dramatic advances in analytic number theory in the years immediately following his 2013 doctorate. These advances have brought him worldwide attention in mathematics and beyond and many prizes including the European Mathematical Society Prize, the Ramanujan Prize and the Whitehead Prize. In 2017 he was appointed Research Professor in Oxford.

James paid tribute to the many people whose work laid the foundations for his own discoveries and the people who have guided him in his career, from his parents to school teachers and university supervisors. He added: "the field of analytic number theory feels revitalised and exciting at the moment with new ideas coming from many different people, and hopefully this prize might inspire younger mathematicians to continue this momentum and make new discoveries about the primes."

The Cole Prize in Number Theory recognizes a notable research work in number theory that has appeared in the last six years. The work must be published in a recognized, peer-reviewed journal.

Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page. Created on 06 Nov 2019 - 14:35.

Ehud Hrushovski awarded the Heinz Hopf Prize

Oxford Mathematician Ehud Hrushovski has been awarded the 2019 Heinz Hopf Prize for his outstanding contributions to model theory and their application to algebra and geometry.

The Heinz Hopf Prize at ETH Zurich honours outstanding scientific achievements in the field of pure mathematics. The prize is awarded every two years with the recipient giving the Heinz Hopf Lecture. This year Ehud spoke on 'Logic and geometry: the model theory of finite fields and difference fields.'

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Martin Bridson wins Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition from the American Mathematical Society

Oxford Mathematician Martin Bridson together with co-author André Haefliger has won the 2020 Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition awarded by the American Mathematical Society for the book 'Metric Spaces of Non-positive Curvature', published by Springer-Verlag in 1999. 

In the words of the citation "Metric Spaces of Non-positive Curvature is the authoritative reference for a huge swath of modern geometric group theory. It realizes Mikhail Gromov's vision of group theory studied via geometry, has been the fundamental textbook for many graduate students learning the subject, and has paved the way for the developments of the subsequent decades."

Professor Martin Bridson is Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics in Oxford, A Fellow of Magdalen College and President of the Clay Mathematics Institute. His research interests lie in geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, and spaces of non-positive curvature. Born on the Isle of Man, In 2016 Martin became only the second Manxman to ever be elected to the Royal Society, after Edward Forbes.

Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page. Created on 25 Oct 2019 - 16:55.

Early Prediction of Sepsis from Clinical Data - Oxford Mathematicians win the PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2019

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition caused by the body’s response to an infection. In the US alone, there are over 970,000 reported cases of sepsis each year accounting for between 6-30% of all Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admissions and over 50% of hospital deaths. It has been reported that in cases of septic shock, the risk of dying increases by approximately 10% for every hour of delay in receiving antibiotics. Early detection of sepsis events is essential in improving sepsis management and mortality rates in the ICU.

Since 2000, PhysioNet has hosted an annual challenge on clinically important problems involving data, whereby participants are invited to submit solutions that are run and scored on hidden test sets to give overall rankings. This year’s challenge was the “Early prediction of Sepsis from Clinical data.”
    
A team from Oxford Mathematics and Oxford Psychiatry which consisted of James Morrill, Andrey Kormilitzin, Alejo Nevado-Holgado, Sam Howison, and Terry Lyons ranked in first place out of 105 entries. The team built a method based on feature extraction using the Signature method. They showed how the model predictions could be used to provide an early warning system for high risk patients who can be given additional treatment or subject to closer monitoring.

Their work was made possible by support from the The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Alan Turing Institute.

Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page. Created on 03 Oct 2019 - 14:28.