Latest news

Roger Penrose was given an honorary degree by the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) on 2 October 2004.

Roger Penrose received the (first) Amaldi Prize by the Italian Society for Relativity and Gravitation on 13 Sept, 2004

Prof. Dominic Welsh has been awarded a three month Visiting Oxford Fellowship at the University of Canterbury beginning on 1 September 2005.

Terence John Lyons, Wallis Professor of Mathematics, St. Anne's College, University of Oxford was named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The induction ceremony took place July 28, 2004 at the IMS Annual Meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

Professor Lyons received the award for fundamental contributions to analysis and probability, ranging from those of a purely geometric character to applications in financial management.

The prize for the best short talk in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Student 2004 Symposium on a graduate research project was awarded to Katerina Kaouri, OCIAM, for her talk "Modelling Sonic Boom".

David Acheson has been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship worth £50,000 in recognition of 'his outstanding contribution to learning and teaching'. He plans to use the award to attempt a breakthrough in the communication of mathematics, particularly to students who are about to start at university.

Congratulations to Roger Penrose on the award of the 2004 De Morgan Medal for `his many deep and important contributions to mathematical physics'. The citation describes Roger as `one of the really original thinkers of our time'.

Congratulations to Boris Zilber on the award of the Senior Berwick Prize for his paper "Exponential sums equations and the Schanuel conjecture." J. London Math. Soc. (2) 65 (2002).

Congratulations to Ulrike Tillmann on the award of a Whitehead Prize. Her citation describes her as `one of the world leaders in the study of the moduli spaces of algebraic curves'.

Congratulations also to Richard Jozsa on the award of the Naylor Prize. Richard, now at Bristol, was a graduate student of Roger Penrose in Oxford; and also to another Whitehead Prize winner and former Oxford student, Richard Thomas, now at Imperial College.

Congratulations to Marc Lackenby on the award of an advanced fellowship.

The Council of Gresham College is pleased to announce that it has appointed Professor Robin Wilson as its new Gresham Professor of Geometry.

Professor Wilson is well-known to Gresham College mathematics enthusiasts as he has given a number of lectures on mathematics and its history at Gresham College over the past four years. In response to the demand for such lectures, as Gresham Professor of Geometry, he will take his audiences on a journey through the entire history of mathematics from the earliest times up the present day.

Professor Wilson's lecture series will begin this autumn and he will deliver six lectures a year for three years. His plan is to devote his three autumn lectures each year to the history of mathematics while other lectures will feature contemporary issues in mathematics.

This coming autumn, he will illustrate a wide range of mathematical activity from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, China, and the Mayan culture of Central America. Other lectures in winter 2005 will focus on some unsolved problems of mathematics.

Professor Wilson comments:

"Mathematics is, and has always been a central part of human culture, and I do not believe that one can fully understand the subject if it is separated from its historical roots. My proposed lectures are designed to support this conviction."

"In order to provide variety, and to attract more diverse audiences, the two series for each year will have different emphases - the first concentrating primarily on historical and multicultural ideas and the second featuring mathematical topics of current interest."

Professor Wilson succeeds Professor Harold Thimbleby whose Professorship ends in May. Previous Chairs of Geometry have included Henry Briggs (co-inventor of logarithms) and Robert Hooke (inventor of the microscope) in the seventeenth century, and more recently Sir Christopher Zeeman, Professor Ian Stewart and Sir Roger Penrose.

Further details about Professor Wilson's lectures and events will be available on the Gresham College website at http://www.gresham.ac.uk over the next few months.

Tsou Sheung Tsun is one of 100 scientists photographed as part of The Faces of Science aimed at making science attractive to a new generation of aspirational school children and students.