# News

Monday, 8 November 2004

# Prof. Frances Kirwan awarded an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship

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.

Sunday, 10 October 2004

# Prof. Roger Penrose receives an Honary Degree from the University of Waterloo

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

Wednesday, 15 September 2004

# Prof. Roger Penrose receives the first Amaldi Prize

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

Tuesday, 24 August 2004

# Terence John Lyons named IMS Fellow

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.

Monday, 19 July 2004

# Katerina Kaouri wins prize for best student talk

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".

Tuesday, 29 June 2004

# David Acheson awarded National Teaching Fellowship

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.

Monday, 21 June 2004

# LMS Prizes

Congratulations to Roger Penrose on the award of the 2004 De Morgan Medal for his many deep and important contributions to mathematical physics'. The citation describes Roger as one of the really original thinkers of our time'.

Congratulations to Boris Zilber on the award of the Senior Berwick Prize for his paper "Exponential sums equations and the Schanuel conjecture." J. London Math. Soc. (2) 65 (2002).

Congratulations to Ulrike Tillmann on the award of a Whitehead Prize. Her citation describes her as `one of the world leaders in the study of the moduli spaces of algebraic curves'.

Congratulations also to Richard Jozsa on the award of the Naylor Prize. Richard, now at Bristol, was a graduate student of Roger Penrose in Oxford; and also to another Whitehead Prize winner and former Oxford student, Richard Thomas, now at Imperial College.

Monday, 21 June 2004

# Marc Lackenby awarded EPSRC Advanced Fellowship

Congratulations to Marc Lackenby on the award of an advanced fellowship.

Friday, 26 March 2004

# Team of Oxford Undergraduates Wins International Mathematical Modelling Competition

A team of three Oxford undergraduates has accomplished something extraordinary: Alex Frolkin, Frederick van der Wyck, and Stephen Burgess, all 3rd year straight maths students at Merton College, have been selected as one of the 7 Outstanding Winners and have been awarded the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) Prize in the 2004 Mathematical Contest in Modelling (MCM) organized by The Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications (COMAP). Still more extraordinary, this was their first time competing in the contest which is typically dominated by institutions that have been training and entering teams for many years.

The MCM is a major international competition that is now in its 20th year of operation. This year there were nearly 600 entries from more than 10 countries. The contest took place over a 96 hour period from February 5th to the 9th. At the start of that period two open-ended mathematical modelling problems of real-world importance were revealed on a website. Teams then chose one of the two problems and worked round the clock with little or no sleep over the next four days to produce a written report describing the construction of a model and how analysis of the model yields a practical solution to the problem at hand.

Alex, Frederick, and Stephen demonstrated the versatility of their mathematical backgrounds by choosing Problem B, which deals with designing a more efficient system for the distribution of ride tickets at an amusement park in order to minimize time spent waiting in queues. They combined tools from statistics, computer simulation and mathematics to determine an optimal strategy. In the 96 hours of the contest they produced a paper good enough to be published in a journal! In fact, it will be published later this year in the UMAP Journal (a journal that emphasizes applied maths, modelling, and undergraduate research), along with the other winning entries from this year's contest.

The team was organized by Prof. Ulrike Tillmann (Merton College) and was coached by maths graduate student Jeff Giansiracusa (Merton College), who competed in the MCM several times as an undergraduate.