Latest news

From Henry Whitehead's pigs to a personal perspective on the physical and intellectual growth of mathematics in Oxford, Michael Atiyah delves deep in to his memories of a lifetime in academia.

During his long mathematical career, Dan Quillen, Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics in Oxford from 1984-2006, kept a set of detailed notes which give a day-to-day record of his mathematical research.  His notebooks have been digitised in a project funded by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) and made available to the mathematics community on the CMI website. Glenys Luke and Graeme Segal are working on cataloguing the material.  So far, the work has been completed up to the end of 1977.

The new Mathematical Institute here in Oxford is one of 11 buildings to have won an RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) South Regional Award 2014.

Images courtesy of Rafael Viñoly Architects, © Will Pryce

This week's Radio 4 Inside Science programme includes a feature on the mathematics of the new Mathematical Institute here in Oxford. Professor Alain Goriely, Bruno Toledo from Architects Rafael Viñoly and Oxford Mathematics students discuss Penrose Tiling, arithmetical progressions and crystals.

Iain Smears, a third-year D.Phil student in the Mathematical Institute here in Oxford and a member of Worcester College has won one of the three SIAM Student Paper Prizes this year for his journal article “Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Approximation of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Equations with Cordes Coefficients,” published in the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis.

The SIAM Student Paper Prizes will be awarded during the course of the 2014 SIAM Annual Meeting, to be held July 7-11 in Chicago, Illinois.

Oxford Mathematics now has its own Twitter account to keep you up to you date with all things mathematical.

https://twitter.com/OxUniMaths

What if you need to search through months of video files to identify a red car that was in shot for just a few seconds. Or how long do you have to scrub something before it can be considered clean? No big deal if it is the washing-up but what if there are hazardous chemicals in your workplace? 

The answer to both problems is mathematics.  Demonstrating this fact was the driving force for the 100th European Study Group with Industry which took place in Oxford from 7-11 April. Nine companies from sectors as diverse as chemicals, logistics, data processing, government and retail presented problems to a range of the world’s best mathematicians in an intensive week of brainstorming. The mathematicians’ brief was simple. Prove that mathematics can work in the real world and have a commercial application and value.

The result? The video search group came up with brand new algorithms for decompressing jpeg files to make objects recognisable by sharpening the edges in the image and reducing the computer-generated artefacts. Glynn Wright, CEO of Aralia, the company involved, said "we now have a clear insight into how we may advance the state-of-the-art in automated scene analysis. The range of skills brought to bear by graduates and professors alike forms a solid basis for our R&D that will keep Aralia busy for many months to come. Some of the results promise to be of considerable significance to virtually everyone who uses digital images."

In parallel the cleansing group modelled the movement of hazardous materials and decontaminants through carpets and concrete. The key new insight was that cleansing is better if the reaction produces products that are soluble in the decontaminant rather than the hazardous material. "The week was a great success" said Anthony Arkell and Hasmitta Stewart of the Government Decontamination Service. "The range of chemicals and types of surfaces proved to be an impossible task to prioritise and investigate within a laboratory but the outcomes from ESGI 100 will allow us to target further research and development and provide better advice in the interim. It was also a great pleasure to be involved with such a range of talented and enthusiastic people". These successes were repeated across the week as mathematicians and industrialists worked side by side on shared interests and goals. 

We often hear that mathematics underpins science. We hear less how it underpins industry. The 100th Study Group and its predecessors demonstrate that mathematics is a crucial industrial resource and that industrial R&D can provide fantastic challenges for mathematicians. For more information please contact Chris Breward (@email).

The Association for Symbolic Logic has announced Dr Jonathan Pila as among the winners of the Carol Karp Prize 2013. This prize is awarded every five years for an outstanding paper or book in the field of symbolic logic. It is made by the Association on recommendation of the ASL Committee on Prizes and Awards for a "connected body of research, most of which has been completed in the time since the previous prize was awarded," and consists of a cash award. Sharing the prize with Dr Pila are Moti Gitik, Ya'acov Peterzil, Segei Starchenko and Alex Wilkie. Alex Wilkie is presently a Logic Group visitor to the Mathematical Institute in Oxford and was a faculty member for many years before moving to Manchester.

Perhaps Bugs Bunny would not have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque if he'd only known some more network analysis?  In a paper published in Physical Review E, Postdoctoral Researcher Sang Hoon Lee, Associate Professor Mason Porter, and their collaborator Mihai Cucuringu from UCLA reported the results of their network analysis of a rabbit warren in a paper on core-periphery structure.  Using measures of high-traffic and low-traffic areas in networks, including novel notions of "core" and "peripheral" junctions and pathways, they were able to characterise the rabbit social and breeding areas in a simple way.  One of the main points of the paper is that one can measure coreness based not only on notions of network density (which is the usual way of approaching the problem) but also on notions of transportation in a network. Lee, Cucuringu, and Porter compared density-based and transportation-based notions of core-periphery structure using a diverse set of applications: urban road networks, a European bank network, generative models for road-like networks, a US migration network, and more.