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Dear all,

We've just been informed that, due to an external high voltage cable fault in Walton Street, the planned shutdown to allow for the transfer of electrical supplies feeding Harkness and Gibson Buildings this weekend has been postponed and will instead be carried out next weekend.

We will send out another notification next week about the new shutdown date.

If you have any queries regarding this notice, please send them to:

@email

Thanks,

Matthew

Dear all,

This notice only applies to people who make use of IT facilities located in the Gibson Building.

Over this weekend a shutdown of all electrical power will occur in the Gibson Building, as the main electrical feed for the building is being moved.

This means that there will be no power in the building until Monday morning.

The IT team will be powering down all IT equipment in the building, starting at 14:00 tomorrow (Fri 5 Dec).

Please make sure that you have saved all your work and logged out of your workstation by this time.

If you have any personal electronic devices (laptops, mobile phone chargers, etc.), we ask that you please disconnect them at this time too.

Please DO NOT plug-in or turn on any electrical equipment after this time, as equipment may be damaged during the electrical work if it is left connected to the power supply.

The IT team will be around on Monday morning to reconnect and power up IT equipment; please wait for us to do this, rather than doing it yourself, so that we can verify that no damage occured during the electrical maintenance. We expect to have everything up and running by 10:00.

If you have any queries regarding this notice, please send them to:

@email

Thanks,

Matthew

The number of phishing attempts is rising significantly and barely a month goes by without reports of another such attempt.

Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites (Youtube, Facebook, Myspace), auction sites (eBay), online banks (PayPal), or IT Administrators (Yahoo, ISPs, corporate) are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting.

Today we find yet another attempt which is very specifically targeted at people with maths.ox.ac.uk email addresses.

Hopefully no one is ever fooled by such emails.

A common characteristic of these emails is a request for your username and password or perhaps your bank details or other personal information. This is a sure sign of a scam. The IT team will never ask you for your username and password and in particular such confidential information would never be suitable for sending via email. If you get an e-mail asking you to follow a link to enter your details, don't click it. Instead, go to the main homepage of the site and check the security certificate before logging in and following their links.

As with any IT query or concern if you feel the need to verify with us that a message is a scam please do contact @email. However, in general we will be aware of these attempts and these scams should be obvious and simply deleted.

Wikipedia has a good entry on phishing for those who want to find out more about the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

Rachel Riley, Oriel 2004, is to fill the role vacated by Carol Vordermann on the popular quiz show Countdown.

See the Times Online article for more details.

As some people may be aware there has been a serious electrical problem for over a year affecting the power supply to buildings on St Giles.

Monday 24th saw the worst power failure yet and resulted in serious disruption to the departmental IT systems.

Since the problem in the street seemed to be unclear, and any attempt at resolution seemed slow, in Spring the department asked for electrical works to be done in the St Giles building that would attempt to resolve internal issues and thus reduce the disruptions.

There have been serious delays with this work. To date the first phase of the work to provide a dedicated distribution board to the server room has been completed. The second phase will redistribute the existing circuits in the room onto this new board. The final phase of the works will then rebalance the three phases within the St Giles building which are currently serious unbalanced.

Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, has been appointed to the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. The Charles Simonyi Professorship was established in 1995 and is held jointly between the Department for Continuing Education and the post-holder’s disciplinary department in the University. The new appointment will take effect from 1 December 2008.

Further information available

Oxford Mathematicians in the City is a new network that aims to bring together Oxford alumni who share a mathematics education and a professional interest in the field of finance and business. We hope that this inaugural event on Tuesday 7th October 2008 will lead to further and regular networking events and a greater sense of unity amongst our alumni.

For further information see the event poster

Professor Marcus du Sautoy has a new four part TV series, The Story of Maths, starting at 9pm (this time is provisional) on Monday 6 October on BBC4.

Marcus has travelled around the world, to take viewers through a 30,000 year history of maths.

We are pleased to announce the following awards:

Lifetime Achievement Awards go to Dr David Acheson and Dr Peter Neumann O.B.E.

A New Appointee Award goes to Prof Tom Witelski.

Teaching Development Awards go to Dr Jan Grabowski, Prof Roger Heath-Brown, Prof Alison Etheridge, Prof Victor Flynn, and Dr Anne Henke

Congratulations to Michael Collins, John Lennox, and John Ockendon on the conferment of the title of Professor of Mathematics, and to Andrew Dancer and Xenia de la Ossa on the conferment of the title Reader in Mathematics.