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We are very sad to hear the news of the death of Peter Neumann earlier today. Peter was the son of the mathematicians Bernhard Neumann and Hanna Neumann and, after gaining a B.A. from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1963, obtained his D.Phil from Oxford University in 1966.

Peter was a Tutorial Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford and a lecturer in the Mathematical Institute in Oxford, retiring in 2008. His work was in the field of group theory. He is also known for solving Alhazen's problem in 1997. In 2011 he published a book on the short-lived French mathematician Évariste Galois.

In 1987 Peter won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for his review of Harold Edwards' book Galois Theory. In 2003, the London Mathematical Society awarded him the Senior Whitehead Prize. He was the first Chairman of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust, from October 1996 to April 2004 and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours. Peter was President of the Mathematical Association from 2015-2016.

The Oxford Mathematics e-newsletter for December is out. Produced each quarter, it's a sort of 'Now That's What I Call Maths,' pulling together our greatest hits of the last few months in one place.

It's for anyone who wants a flavour of what we do - research, online teaching, public lectures, having a laugh.

And it's COVID-lite. Click here.

Over the past few weeks we have made 7 undergraduate lectures publicly available, sampling a range of topics from Geometry to Differential Equations. Today & over the next 2 weeks for the first time we're showing a full course on our YouTube Channel. Ben Green's 2nd Year 'Metric Spaces' (the first half of the Metric Spaces and Complex Analysis course)' gets to grips with the concept of distance. 

We are making these lectures available to give an insight in to life in Oxford Mathematics. All lectures are followed by tutorials where students meet their tutor in pairs to go through the lecture and associated worksheet. Course materials can be found here

This Tuesday, 8th December, from 8am GMT onwards (repeated) you can watch 2020 Physics Laureate and Oxford Mathematician Roger Penrose's specially recorded Nobel Lecture in which he talks about the background to and genesis of his work on Black Holes which won him the prize; and also where our understanding of Black Holes is taking us. 

On the same day Roger will be presented with the Nobel diploma and medal at the Swedish Ambassador’s Residence in London and you can watch this as part of the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony from 3.30pm GMT on Thursday 10 December. Watch both here. 

As Roger said on receiving the news of the award: "In 1964 the existence of Black Holes was not properly appreciated. Since then they have become of increased importance in our understanding of the Universe and I believe this could increase in unexpected ways in the future."

Roger Penrose is one of our greatest living scientists. His work on Black Holes provided the mathematical tools needed by experimentalists to go and find Black Holes. His fellow prize winners, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel went and did just that.

However, Roger's work has ranged much further than just the Universe, from twistor theory to quasi-periodic tiling, spin networks to impossible triangles, a range that perhaps might not be so encouraged in academia today.

Now in his 90th year Roger is still researching and writing. He will give an Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture in January 2021 to celebrate the Nobel Prize.

Photography below and above by Professor Alain Goriely.  Updated photographs further below of Roger receiving the Nobel Medal and Diploma from the Swedish Ambassador in London on 8 December.

The latest in our Autumn 2020 series of lectures is the first lecture in Alan Lauder's Second Year Linear Algebra Course. In this lecture Alan (with help from Cosi) explains to students how the course will unfold before going on to talk specifically about Vector Spaces and Linear Maps.

All lectures are followed by tutorials where students meet their tutor in pairs to go through the lecture and associated worksheet. The course materials and worksheets can be found here.

That's Cosi on the left.

The second in the series of Student Lectures that we are making publicly available this Autumn is from Vicky Neale. Vicky is one of our most popular lecturers and this lecture is from her First Year Analysis course. 

The course introduces students to a rigorous definition of convergence, allowing them to develop their previous understanding of sequences and series and to prove key results about convergence, leading on to subsequent Analysis courses addressing continuity, differentiability and integrability of functions.

All lectures are followed by tutorials where students meet their tutor in pairs to go through the lecture and associated worksheet.

Oxford Mathematics Online Public Lecture: Anna Seigal - Ideas for a Complex World

Thursday 19 November, 5-6pm. No need to register, watching details below (and the talk will stay up afterwards).

Humans have been processing information in the world for a long time, finding patterns and learning from our surroundings to solve problems. Today, scientists make sense of complex problems by gathering vast amounts of data, and analysing them with quantitative methods. These methods are important tools to understand the issues facing us: the spread of disease, climate change, or even political movements. But this quantitative toolbox can seem far removed from our individual approaches for processing information in our day-to-day lives. This disconnect and inaccessibility leads to the scientific tools becoming entangled in politics and questions of trust.

In this talk, Anna will describe how some of the ideas at the heart of science’s quantitative tools are familiar to us all. We’ll see how mathematics enables us to turn the ideas into tools. As a society, if we can better connect with the ideas driving this toolbox, we can see when to use (and not to use) the available tools, what’s missing from the toolbox, and how we might come up with new ideas to drive our future understanding of the world around us.

Anna Seigal is a Hooke Research Fellow in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at The Queen's College.

Watch live (no need to register):
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The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.

Fernando Alday has been appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford. The Rouse Ball Professorship of Mathematics is one of the senior chairs in the Mathematics Department in Oxford (and also in Cambridge). The two positions were founded in 1927 by a bequest from the mathematician W. W. Rouse Ball. Previous Rouse Ball Professors include Charles Coulson, Philip Candelas (the retiring Rouse Ball and best known for his work on String Theory) and recent Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose. The Rouse Ball Professor in Oxford is a Fellow of Wadham College.

Fernando Alday is an Argentinean Theoretical Physicist and Mathematician. He did his undergraduate at Centro Atomico Bariloche, Argentina, and his DPhil at SISSA, Italy, under the supervision of Edi Gava and Kumar Narain. He joined Oxford in 2010, after doing Postdocs at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and at the Institute for Advanced Study in the US. 

Following the tradition of Rouse Ball chairs at Oxford, Fernando is well known for the development of mathematical tools to understand fundamental questions in Quantum Field Theory and Quantum Gravity. Fernando's most important contributions involve surprising dualities among different theories and observables in high energy theoretical physics. One of these dualities relates scattering amplitudes to minimal surfaces/soap bubbles in anti-de-Sitter space, while another, known as the AGT correspondence, relates correlation functions in a two-dimensional theory to the spectrum of four-dimensional gauge theories. More recently, Fernando has been developing mathematical tools to compute string and M-theory amplitudes in curved space-time, a subject still in its infancy.

Over the next few weeks we shall we making a wide range of our undergraduate lectures available via our YouTube channel to add to those that are already there. The aim is not to provide detailed tuition but to give an insight in to the student experience in Oxford. However, we will be putting up one full course as part of the Autumn series.

Topics covered will include First Year Analysis, Second Year Linear Algebra and Probability and Third Year Geometry of Surfaces and Mathematical History. We would add that all lectures are online this term, but some of the tutorials that are given by tutors to pairs of students on the back of the lectures are taking place in person.

So we start with Professor Derek Moulton and a lecture from his First Year Geometry course. As Derek says in his introduction, geometry is ubiquitous in mathematics. Why not take a look?