You are an Ipswich Town fan, so you need some fantasy in your life (they are not very good just now for those of you who are not football fans). Oxford Mathematician Josh Bull is an Ipswich fan. So he entered the Fantasy Football Premier League along with 8 million others, some of whom might even have been mathematicians.
His secret. Well, yes he is a mathematician, but his real secret was not to choose any players from Ipswich's local rivals Norwich. It worked. Norwich came bottom of the real Premier League.
Watch out soon for Josh's Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture on the best strategies for Fantasy Football success.
Oxford Mathematicians James Maynard has been elected to Academia Europaea. He joins 13 other Oxford Mathematicians in the Academy which boasts 4000 members and 70 Nobel laureates. The Academy seeks the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages in the aforesaid subjects in Europe.
Still only 33, James Maynard is one of the brightest stars in world mathematics at the moment, having made dramatic advances in analytic number theory in recent years. A recent interview in Quanta Magazine delves in to James's work and his thinking.
Oxford Mathematician Bryan Birch has been awarded the Royal Society's Sylvester Medal for 2020 for his work in driving the theory of elliptic curves through the Birch--Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and the theory of Heegner points. The Birch--Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is one of the Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Problems.
The Sylvester Medal is awarded annually for an outstanding researcher in the field of mathematics. The award was created in memory of the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester FRS who was Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford in the 1880s. It was first awarded in 1901. The medal is of bronze and is accompanied by a gift of £2,000.
Bryan Birch was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge where as a doctoral student he proved Birch's theorem, one of the results to come out of the Hardy–Littlewood circle method; it shows that odd-degree rational forms in a large enough set of variables must have zeroes.
He then worked with Peter Swinnerton-Dyer on computations relating to the Hasse–Weil L-functions of elliptic curves. They formulated their conjecture relating the rank of an elliptic curve to the order of a certain zero of an L-function; it has been an influence on the development of number theory since the mid 1960s. They later introduced modular symbols.
In later work he contributed to algebraic K-theory (Birch–Tate conjecture). He then formulated ideas on the role of Heegner points (he had been one of those reconsidering Kurt Heegner's original work, on the class number one problem, which had not initially gained acceptance). Birch put together the context in which the Gross–Zagier theorem was proved. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972; was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1993 and the De Morgan Medal in 2007. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Oxford Mathematicians Martin Bridson and Endre Suli have been elected to Academia Europaea. The Academy seeks the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages in the aforesaid subjects in Europe.
Martin is Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics in Oxford. His research interests lie in geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, and spaces of non-positive curvature. He is also President of the Clay Mathematics Institute, a Fellow of Magdalen College and a former Head of the Mathematical Institute in Oxford.
Endre is Professor of Numerical Analyisis and a Fellow of Worcester College. His research interests include the mathematical and numerical analysis of nonlinear partial differential equations, and finite element methods.
Gui-Qiang's main research areas lie in nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs), nonlinear analysis, and their applications to mechanics, geometry, other areas of mathematics and the other sciences.
He is Statutory Professor in the Analysis of Partial Differential Equations, Professorial Fellow of Keble College, Director, Oxford Centre for Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (OxPDE) and Director, EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Partial Differential Equations.
Oxford Mathematician Cristiana De Filippis has been awarded this year’s Gioacchino Iapichino prize in Mathematical Analysis by the Italian National Academy, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The prize recognises outstanding contributions to the field by early-career mathematicians.
Cristiana has been a postgraduate student in the Oxford Centre for Nonlinear PDEs for the past 4 years and successfully defended her DPhil thesis in June 2020. Her research interests include the Calculus of Variations and Regularity Theory.
Alongside the mathematics, the Andrew Wiles Building, home to Oxford Mathematics, has always been a venue for art, whether on canvas, sculpture, photography or even embedded in the maths itself.
However, lockdown has proved especially challenging for the creative arts with venues shut. Many have turned to online exhibitions and we felt that not only should we do the same but by so doing we could stress the connection between art and science and how both are descriptions of our world.
So we invited our locked down mathematicians to explore their mathematical creativity in a variety of media. A panel reviewed all the submissions, taking into account both the creative aspects and the mathematical component, alongside the description communicating the link.
So here is the first Oxford Mathematics Online Exhibition.
Oxford Mathematician Andrea Mondino has been awarded a Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society (LMS) in recognition of his contributions to geometric analysis in differential and metric settings and in particular for his central part in the development of the theory of metric measure spaces with Ricci curvature lower bounds.
Andrea works at the interface between Analysis and Geometry. More precisely he studies problems arising from (differential and metric) geometry by using analytic techniques such as optimal transport, functional analysis, partial differential equations, calculus of variations, gradient flows, nonlinear analysis and geometric measure theory. Although the emphasis of his work is primarily theoretical, the topics and the techniques have profound links with applications to natural sciences (mainly physics and biology) and economics.
Ulrike's research interests include Riemann surfaces and the homology of their moduli spaces. Her work on the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and manifolds of higher dimensions has been inspired by problems in quantum physics and string theory. More recently her work has broadened into areas of data science.
Ulrike is also well-known for her many contributions to the broader mathematical community, serving on a range of scientific boards including membership of the Council of the Royal Society. She will take over from the current LMS President (and Oxford Mathematician) Jon Keating in November 2021.
I started off by using a compass to draw the main circles and arcs you see in the drawing, varying the diameter to get circles that would fit perfectly into the spaces. The rest of the design is done free hand with the aim of making everything rotationally symmetric. That is, you could turn the page by 1/8th of a full circle and end up exactly where you started!
Leon is a Mathematics Undergraduate in the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.
