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Oxford Mathematician Linus Schumacher has won the prestigious Reinhart Heinrich Doctoral Thesis Award. The award is presented annually to the student submitting the best doctoral thesis in any area of Mathematical and Theoretical Biology. 

In the judges' view "Linus' thesis is an outstanding example of how mathematical modelling and analysis that is kept close to the experimental system can contribute efficiently to advance the understanding of complex biological questions. The roles of cellular heterogeneity, microenvironmental cues and cell-to-cell interactions, which are common themes in the study of biomedical systems, are skillfully dissected and analysed in relevant experimental model systems, leading to significant advances in the current understanding of said systems."

The judges concluded: "the modelling aims to derive generic, theoretical insights from specific, biological questions. The work has led to a number of excellent publications."

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has announced that Professors Xunyu Zhou and Endre Suli from Oxford Mathematics are among its newly elected Fellows for 2016.

SIAM exists to ensure the strongest interactions between mathematics and other scientific and technological communities through membership activities, publication of journals and books, and conferences.

Congratulations to Jan Obloj who has been awarded the title of Professor in the University of Oxford's annual Recognition of Distinction exercise.
 

Oxford Mathematician and Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Marcus du Sautoy, has received the award of Doctor of Science of the University of South Wales for his outstanding research record in mathematics and his exceptional contribution to the promotion of the public understanding of mathematics and science. He will receive the award on 13th July 2015.

Six Oxford Mathematicians are among the 2015 London Mathematical Society prizewinners. 

A Polya Prize was awarded to Professor Boris Zilber for his visionary contributions to model theory and its applications.

A Naylor Prize and Lectureship in Applied Mathematics was awarded to Professor Jon Chapman (pictured) for his outstanding contributions to modelling and methods development in applied mathematics.

Whitehead Prizes were awarded to the following:

Professor Peter Keevash for his work in combinatorics, in particular his stunning proof of the existence of combinatorial designs for all parameters satisfying the obvious necessary conditions, 

James Maynard for his spectacular results on gaps between prime numbers. He simplified and extended the work of Zhang on bounded gaps between primes, then made the most substantial advance on how large the gap between consecutive primes can be for 75 years, in particular answering a 10,000 dollar conjecture of Erdos.

Professor Mason Porter in recognition of his outstanding interdisciplinary contributions and in particular to the emerging field of network science, where he has combined unique analysis of biological, social and political data sets with novel methods for community detection and other forms of coarse graining.

Professor Dominic Vella for his spectacular contributions to the modelling of instability and interfacial phenomena in fluids and solids.

In addition an Anne Bennett Prize was awarded to Oxford Mathematics Visiting Fellow Apala Majumdar (University of Bath) in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the mathematics of liquid crystals and to the liquid crystal community.

Congratulations to Oxford Mathematicians Dmitry Belyaev, Ian Hewitt, Derek Moulton, Christoph Reisinger, Zubin Siganporia (pictured), Robert Style, Nick Trefethen and Sarah Waters who have all won departmental teaching awards for the year. 

OxTALENT is an annual competition and a ceremony designed to recognise and award colleagues and students from across the University for creative use of digital technologies in teaching, learning and outreach.

This year Thomas Woolley and William Binzi from Oxford Mathematics were awarded runner-up prizes in the Academic Podcasting category for their work with Mareli Augustyn in creating a video series of A Mathemagician’s Holiday. This workshop was originally created by Woolley, Binzi and Daniel Martin for an international trip to visit Dulwich Colleges in China. The workshop involves students getting to grips with mathematical problems all set around the theme of travel.

“We felt that teachers and schools around the UK might benefit from this workshop, but unfortunately we just cannot get to all the schools that contact us for a visit,” said Mareli when asked how the project started. “We thought that creating a video series might enable teachers to view the activities and do them in their own classrooms.”

The videos are not a perfectly produced work, but there is great interest in such material. The video series was posted on the University’s podcasting site, https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/mathematicians-holiday and received 700 views between October 2014 and May 2015. It was also placed on the TESConnect repository and viewed 420 times over the same period. The OxTALENT award was in recognition of the attempt to engage teachers and the public in Mathematics using digital media.

For more on the OxTALENT awards, please go to http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/oxtalent/

Patrick Farrell, Early Career Research Fellow in Applied Mathematics in Oxford, together with colleagues from the Simula Research Laboratory and Imperial College London, has won this year's 2015 Wilkinson Prize. Their award was given for their work in developing dolfin-adjoint, a package which automatically derives and solves adjoint and tangent linear equations from high-level mathematical specifications of finite element discretisations of partial differential equations. The prize will be presented at ICIAM 2015 and will consist of $3000 plus a commemorative plaque for each winner.

The Wilkinson Prize was established to honour the outstanding contributions of Dr James Hardy Wilkinson to the field of numerical software. It is awarded every four years.

Angkana Rüland of the Mathematical Institute in Oxford and Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church College has won the Hausdorff prize for the best thesis at the University of Bonn for her work on "On Some Rigidity Properties in PDEs". Since leaving Bonn in April 2014, Angkana has been part of the Oxford Centre for Non-Linear PDE under Sir John Ball.