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Dr Peter Neumann, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics in Oxford and Fellow of the Queen's College, will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of Hull in January 2016.  

Peter Neumann's research has ranged over a number of areas of algebra and its history and he has published about 130 articles, books and reviews. He is an expert on the work of Évariste Galois. He has been awarded a number of prizes including the Senior Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society in 2003, and the David Crighton Medal jointly by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the London Mathematical Society in 2012. He was appointed an Officer in the Order of the British Empire, New Year 2008, for services to education. 

Peter has taken on many roles during his career including Chairman of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust (UKMT) and President of the British Society for History of Mathematics (BSHM). Presently (April 2015 t0 April 2016) He is President of the Mathematical Association (MA).

Most old-established mathematics departments around the world have somewhere, gathering dust in a corner cabinet, a collection of plaster models of surfaces. In the 1880s these were a must-have item for geometrically minded mathematicians and James Joseph Sylvester, the Savilian Professor of Geometry in Oxford, accordingly acquired a set from Germany. They were not cheap, and in October 1886 Sylvester had to cancel a series of lectures because a cash-strapped university hadn’t agreed his equipment grant. 

Inspired by Sylvester's collection, artists and poets are working with the University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute to create an exhibition which will be held in the new Mathematical Institute, the Andrew Wiles Building. The exhibition, Illegitimate Objects, will run from 18 September to 12 November 2015, Monday to Friday 9am-5pm. Admission is free.

When you think about the founders of computing you may think Alan Turing, you may even think Charles Babbage. But you should definitely think about Ada Lovelace. Ada is not only the link between Babbage and Turing, but a woman of fierce originality and intellectual interests whose ideas went beyond Babbage’s ideas of computers as manipulating numbers, and focused on their creative possibilities and their limits, the very issues with which we are wrestling today.

In 2015 the University of Oxford will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Ada’s birth.  The centrepiece of the celebrations will be a display at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library (13 October – 18 December 2015) and a Symposium (9 and 10 December 2015), presenting Lovelace’s life and work, and contemporary thinking on computing and artificial intelligence.

Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), is best known for her remarkable article about Charles Babbage’s unbuilt computer, the Analytical Engine. The article presented the first documented computer program, to calculate the Bernoulli numbers, and explained the ideas underlying Babbage’s  machine – and every one of the billions of computers and computer programs in use today. Her contribution was highlighted in one of Alan Turing’s most famous papers ‘Can a machine think?’ Lovelace had wide scientific and intellectual interests and studied with scientist Mary Somerville, and with Augustus De Morgan, a leading mathematician and pioneer in logic and algebra.

The display, in the Bodleian’s new Weston Library, will offer a chance to see Lovelace’s correspondence with Babbage and De Morgan, and her childhood exercises and mathematical notes.   It features a remarkable new discovery in the archives -  Lovelace and Babbage working together on magic squares and network algorithms – the dawn of “computational thinking.”

The Symposium, on 9th and 10th December 2015, is aimed at a broad audience interested in the history and culture of mathematics and computer science, presenting current scholarship on Lovelace’s life and work, and linking her ideas to contemporary thinking about computing and artificial intelligence. It is a truly interdisciplinary event, and confirmed speakers so far include Lovelace’s direct descendant the Earl of Lytton, Lovelace biographer Betty Toole, computer historian Doron Swade, historian Richard Holmes, computer scientist Moshe Vardi and graphic novelist Sydney Padua. Oxford researchers Christopher Hollings and Ursula Martin will present their new research on Lovelace’s mathematics.

Oxford has a remarkable history of programming research, with two winners of the ACM A M Turing Award, the Nobel Prize for Computer Science, and the unique breadth and depth of Oxford’s expertise brings a variety of perspectives to understanding Lovelace and the remarkable intellectual community around her, visionaries whose ideas underpin modern computing.

For more details about the celebrations: http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace

Twitter: #lovelaceoxford

Image reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited (www.pollingerltd.com) on behalf of the estate of Ada Lovelace.

You may also be interested in a BBC4 film about the life of Ada Lovelace, to be broadcast at 9pm on 17 September www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p030s5bx and Radio 4 will feature readings from Lovelace’s letters at 11 am on 14 and 21 September.

Collaboration may have a claim to being the most overused word in academia (and one or two other places as well), but as the world accumulates more and more data and is able to study mechanisms and organisms at an ever smaller scale, then it is inevitable that more than one expertise is needed to describe the full story.

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

A newly commissioned portrait of Sir Andrew Wiles, the Oxford Mathematician, has been unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery. The four-by-three foot portrait is by London artist Rupert Alexander, who has painted the Queen and members of the Royal Family.   

Artist Rupert Alexander says: ‘I wanted to convey the cerebral world Sir Andrew inhabits, but rather than doing so by furnishing the composition with books or the obligatory blackboard of equations, I tried to imply it simply through the light and atmosphere. Mathematics appears to me an austere discipline, so casting him in a cool, blue light seemed apt.’

Sir Andrew Wiles by Rupert Alexander is on display in Room 38 at the National Portrait Gallery from Tuesday 14 July, Admission free.

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.

In this Public Lecture Gábor Domokos continues his exploration of the meaning and naming of shape, recounting his creation of the Gomboc and speculating where the journey may lead him in the future.

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.