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The 2014 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize has been awarded to Dr. James Maynard of Oxford University and the University of Montreal, Canada for his contribution to Number theory, especially in the field of Prime Numbers.

The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize was established in 2005 and is awarded annually for outstanding contributions by young mathematicians to areas influenced by Srinivasa Ramanujan. The age limit for the prize has been set at 32 because Ramanujan achieved so much in his brief life of 32 years. The prize will be awarded during December 21-22 at the International Conference on Number Theory at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam (Ramanujan's hometown) where the prize has been given annually.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests, including Vicky Neale, Whitehead Lecturer here in Oxford, discuss Euler's number, also known as e. First discovered in the seventeenth century by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli when he was studying compound interest, e is now recognised as one of the most important and interesting numbers in mathematics. Roughly equal to 2.718, e is useful in studying many everyday situations, from personal savings to epidemics. Thursday 25 September, 9.00am.

On 19 September 1994 Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, correcting the error in his original paper. It remains one of the great achievements in the history of mathematics and a compelling human story as captured in Simon Singh’s film.

The International Brain Mechanics and Trauma Lab at the University of Oxford is a compelling example of modern scientific collaboration. Comprising academics from across the sciences, both medical and life science and including Mathematicians and Engineers, the lab is pooling its talents to better understand the relations between brain-tissue mechanics and brain function, diseases and trauma.
 
The lab and its collaborators are addressing a range of issues around impact and brain function, notably in sports injuries as society wakes up to the potential damage that our sports men and women face from impact injuries. As this article in the Irish Times explains, a deeper understanding requires a pooling of resources to examine the brain at cell, tissue and medical levels.

Professor John Ball, Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy & Director, Oxford Centre for Nonlinear PDE, University of Oxford has been re-elected as a member of the International Council for Science Executive Board. The International Council for Science (ICSU) is a non-governmental organisation with a global membership of national scientific bodies (121 Members, representing 141 countries) and International Scientific Unions (32 Members). ICSU’s mission is to strengthen international science for the benefit of society. To do this, ICSU mobilizes the knowledge and resources of the international science community.

The General Assembly of the International Council for Science today endorsed open access principles and provided key recommendations guarding against the misuse of metrics in the evaluation of research performance. In a strong show of support for open access to the scientific record, the Assembly, which unites representatives of 120 national scientific academies and 31 international scientific unions, today voted for the statement which stakes out 5 key goals for open access, and offers 12 recommendations that pave the road for attaining them. 

"Open Access is a key mechanism to support the development of science and of vital importance to all scientists both young and old," said Prof. John Ball, who led the ICSU working group that developed the statement. "It is a powerful tool for creating and validating knowledge, and for supporting science as a public good, and not as something carried out behind closed doors," he added.

The five goals in the statement assert that access to the scientific record should be free of financial barriers for any researcher to contribute to; free of financial barriers for any user to access immediately on publication; made available without restriction on reuse for any purpose, subject to proper attribution; quality-assured and published in a timely manner; and archived and made available in perpetuity.

The statement also makes twelve recommendations for achieving these goals, including recommendations on metrics, stating that these, when used as an aid to the evaluation of research and researchers, should help promote open access and open science. It also cautions that metrics should be regarded as an aid, and not a substitute, for good decision-making. They should not normally be used in isolation to assess the performance of researchers, to determine appointments, or to distribute funds to individuals or research groups, for which it says expert review is indispensable.

The Council's position takes account of the specific situation related to research data, asserting that publishers should require authors to provide explicit references to the datasets underlying published research. They also should require clear assurances that these datasets are deposited and available in trusted and sustainable digital repositories. Citing datasets in reference lists using an accepted standard format should be considered the norm. 

The statement also suggests that terms of contracts governing the purchase of scientific periodicals and databases by libraries serving universities and research establishments should be publicly accessible.

The full report is available for download.

ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL FOR SCIENCE

The International Council for Science (ICSU) is a non-governmental organisation with a global membership of national scientific bodies (121 Members, representing 141 countries) and International Scientific Unions (31 Members). It mobilizes the knowledge and resources of the international scientific community to strengthen international science for the benefit of society.

www.icsu.org

ABOUT PROF. JOHN BALL

Sir John Ball is Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He was the President of the International Mathematical Union from 2003–06 and is a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and Sussex University, and prior to taking up his Oxford post was a professor of mathematics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. He is also a member of the Executive Board of the International Council for Science (ICSU).

Bryce McLeod received his early education at Aberdeen Grammar School, where his grandfather had been Head of Mathematics and Science. As was not uncommon in the Scottish education system at the time, he followed an accelerated path through the school and moved to the University of Aberdeen at the age of 16, receiving a First-Class BA degree in Mathematics & Natural Philosophy in 1950. He was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he received a second First Class BA degree in 1952. His tutor there. TW Chaundy of Christ Church, was a specialist in differential equations and was influential in shaping Bryce's intellectual path; he coauthored the first of Bryce's 150-plus papers. Following a year as a Rotary Foundation Fellow in Vancouver and two years' National Service, Bryce returned to Oxford to complete a DPhil with Titchmarsh in 1958. He and Eunice married in 1956. After a spell of two years as a Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, during which the first of their four children was born, Bryce returned to Wadham College, Oxford in 1960 and remained there until 1988, becoming a University Lecturer (with a much reduced college teaching load) in 1970.

Throughout this first stage of his career, Bryce had maintained regular contact with applied analysts in the US, in particular in Madison where he spent a number of sabbatical years and greatly expanded his range of contacts; indeed, his twins were born in Madison. He visited the US regularly and received many offers to cross the Atlantic. In 1988, faced with imminent mandatory retirement in the UK and feeling that (unlike today) applied analysis was not properly appreciated at Oxford, he moved to Pittsburgh, where he remained until 2007. He and Eunice had retained their house in the UK, however, and the migration reversed so that summers were often spent in Oxford, visiting the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM) and the Oxford Centre for Nonlinear PDE (OxPDE), as well as elsewhere in Europe. When Bryce had retired from Pittsburgh they returned to live in Abingdon, while Bryce based himself in OxPDE for the remainder of his career.

Bryce was elected FRSE in 1974 and FRS in 1992. He received the Whittaker Prize of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in 1965, the Keith Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1987, and the Naylor Prize and Lectureship in Applied Mathematics of the London Mathematical Society in 2011.

Bryce considered himself a problem-solving mathematician rather than a builder of general theories. He liked to focus on a specific hard problem and to find something new to say about it that was at the same time rigorous, interesting and useful. He was, of course, fully au fait with modern techniques but he added to this a deep understanding in the style of the more classical tradition he had inherited from Chaundy, Titchmarsh and their predecessors. He solved problems with consummate skill across an extraordinary range of areas as diverse as fluid mechanics, general relativity, plasma physics, mathematical biology, superconductivity, Painlevé equations, coagulation processes, nonlinear diffusion and pantograph equations, among many others. He had long-lasting and productive collaborations with very many distinguished mathematicians, both applied analysts like himself and modellers whose differential equation had caught his interest: he was always interested to look at new problems unearthed by colleagues working in a more applications-focused way. His work was characterised by great lucidity of thought married to immense creativity and ingenuity of argument. Although he worked on many different problems some general themes did emerge. Prominent among these was the importance of the study of similarity solutions as indicators of more general behaviour, along with the development of a powerful suite of techniques for 'shooting' methods, especially with more than one shooting parameter. A McLeod seminar or lecture was a model of clarity: as the subject unfolded the board was filled from left to right with economical, spare notes in his characteristic hand, and the audience invariably left feeling they had witnessed a tour de force of applied analysis.

Many, many people throughout the mathematical community remember Bryce with great fondness:  for his kindness and support for students and colleagues alike; for his intensely amused laughter or his rapt concentration on an explanation; for his zest for life and mathematics. Just as he was adventurous in the topics he worked on, so he and his family had many adventures along the way. For example, as they visited the US so often, Bryce and Eunice bought what Bryce termed a 'motor caravan' (in fact, a huge Winnebago) and took the family round that vast country on 'a blissful combination of vacation and mathematics'. The last words should be Bryce's: in an interview with John Ball, he was asked what advice he would give a young mathematician just starting their research career. The answer was simple: “Have fun”. Bryce certainly did that.

Sam Howison

August 2014

On Wednesday 27th August at 7pm Oxford Mathematicians Thomas Woolley and Paul Taylor can be seen on London Live (during the "Not The One Show") presenting parts of
the London "Maths in the City" (http://www.mathsinthecity.com/) walking tour which has been incredibly popular with the public. The tours aim to highlight and demonstrate the mathematics that are important in the running and construction of a successful city.

For those of you who do not live in London the footage will be available on the "Not The One Show" website (http://www.londonlive.co.uk/programmes/not-the-one-show) catch up service shortly after the programme has aired.