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Oxford Mathematician Emmanuel Breuillard has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the UK’s national academy of sciences and the oldest science academy in continuous existence.

Emmanuel is Professor of Pure Mathematics in Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. He works at the interface between algebra and analysis. He has made contributions to the study of finite and infinite groups, using a wealth of methods from diverse areas of mathematics, including combinatorics, mathematical logic, probability theory, dynamics, or diophantine analysis. 

Among them feature his work on free subgroups of Lie groups, the development (with Ben Green and Terence Tao) of a structure theory for approximate groups, and his study (with Peter Varju) of mixing and equidistribution phenomena for random walks on groups with applications to self-similarity and random polynomials. He was a recipient of an EMS Prize in 2012, was an invited speaker at the ICM in 2014 and is a member of Academia Europaea since 2021. 

Oxford Mathematics now has 33 Fellows of the Royal Society among its current and retired members: Fernando Alday, John Ball, Bryan Birch, Martin Bridson, Philip Candelas, Marcus du Sautoy, Artur Ekert, Alison Etheridge, Alain Goriely, Ian Grant, Ben Green, Roger Heath-Brown, Nigel Hitchin, Ehud Hrushovski, Ioan James, Dominic Joyce, Jon Keating, Frances Kirwan, Terry Lyons, Philip Maini, Vladimir Markovic, James Maynard, Jim Murray, John Ockendon, Roger Penrose, Jonathan Pila, Graeme Segal, Endre Süli, Martin Taylor, Ulrike Tillmann, Nick Trefethen, Andrew Wiles, and Emmanuel himself, of course.

The newly-created Academy for the Mathematical Sciences today announced that Oxford Mathematician Alison Etheridge OBE FRS will be its first President. She will take up the role from 17 June 2024.

The UK-wide Academy will focus on mathematical sciences wherever they happen. This includes teaching and education, academic research pushing the frontiers of what is known, and mathematical sciences in business and in government. It recognises that many crucial policy areas affecting mathematical sciences are devolved. It will also have a wide and inclusive definition of mathematical sciences - and is committed to improving opportunities for previously underrepresented groups of people.

Alison is Professor of Probability in Oxford, having worked at the Universities of Cambridge, Berkeley, Edinburgh and Queen Mary University London before returning to Oxford. Her interests have ranged from abstract mathematical problems to concrete applications with her recent work focused on mathematical modelling of population genetics. She was Head of the Department of Statistics in Oxford until August 2022.

Alison herself says: " by bringing together the whole mathematical sciences community, the Academy will have an authoritative and persuasive voice and so achieve its ambition of enabling the mathematical sciences to deliver on its full potential.”

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What do maypole dancing, grocery delivery, and the quadratic formula all have in common? The answer is: braids! In this Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture, Tara will explore how the ancient art of weaving strands together manifests itself in a variety of modern settings, both within mathematics and in our wider culture.    

Tara Brendle is a Professor of Mathematics in the School of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Glasgow. Her research lies in the area of geometric group theory, at the interface between algebra and topology. She is co-author of 'Braids: A Survey', appearing in 'The Handbook of Knot Theory'.

Please email @email to register to attend in person.

The lecture will be broadcast on the Oxford Mathematics YouTube Channel on Thursday 16 May at 5-6pm and any time after (no need to register for the online version).

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures were begun with the intention of conveying the huge impact that mathematics has on our lives; but with a parallel acknowledgement that mathematics itself is a complex and often incomprehensible subject. Even professional mathematicians can be lost when straying in to a field in maths outside their expertise.

Equally we didn't want to hide the maths in all its beauty and complexity and so understanding would vary from audience member to audience member. However, the concept behind each lecture, whether about big data, black holes, or Johann Sebastian Bach should be up front. The detail would follow in varying degrees of complexity.

And we recorded them all (well, nearly all, some early lectureres were not so keen but soon we insisted). So now you can choose between nearly 80 lectures on a range of topics, a range that spans far and wide as is hinted above. The most recent three are below. The full playlist is here.

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.

Oxford Mathematician Katherine Benjamin has won the Silver Medal for Mathematical Sciences at the 2024 STEM for BRITAIN poster competition held in the House of Commons on March 4th. Katherine was among 20 researchers in mathematics presenting their work to politicians and a panel of expert judges.

Katherine's poster was entitled: 'Multiscale topology classifies and quantifies cell types in subcellular spatial transcriptomic', and Katherine says, "the poster explored new ways in which we’ve been using maths to help understand complex next-generation genomics data. We use tools and techniques from topology and algebra to identify spatial patterns in the organisation of immune cells under different treatments. The exciting thing is that we can use abstract mathematics to generate real-world testable hypotheses for our collaborators in medicine to study further. This is joint work with a team of mathematicians, including Heather Harrington and Ulrike Tillmann from Oxford Mathematics and researchers from Medical Sciences in Oxford."

STEM for BRITAIN aims to help politicians understand more about the UK’s thriving science and engineering base and rewards some of the strongest scientific and engineering research being undertaken in the UK.

The next two films in our' Show Me the Maths' series demonstrate two contrasting aspects of the mathematics that we do here in Oxford. 

In the first, Josh Bull, talks about the challenge of making mathematical models have application to real patient data, in Josh's case in the field of oncology. In the second, Nathan Creighton discusses his work on Dirichlet-L functions.

'Show Me the Maths': short films that unashamedly get down to the detail.