Public procurement – or government contracting – is critical to development, accounting for as much as 50% of government spending in developing countries. The procurement process is known to be highly prone to corruption, however corruption is difficult to detect or measure. A recent project led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with Sussex University and Government Transparency Institute has been using and implementing new methodologies for analysing large open public procurement datasets to detect ‘red flags’ that could indicate risks of corruption. Now, researchers from Oxford Mathematics are supporting the delivery of workshops in Africa to share these new methodologies and software tools with anti-corruption groups and researchers to enable them to analyse corruption risks in public procurement data.
Danny Parsons from the African Maths Initiative and Postdoctoral Research Assistant with Prof Balazs Szendroi at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford and Dr Elizabeth David-Barrett (Sussex University) delivered a 2-day workshop at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Ghana on Analysing Public Procurement Data for Corruption Risks. This workshop came out of an earlier collaboration between Dr David-Barrett, Dr Mihaly Fazekas (Government Transparency Institute), Prof Szendroi and Danny Parsons on data driven approaches to measuring corruption risks in government contracting. During that project Danny Parsons worked on implementing new methodologies for detecting corruption risks into an open source front end to the R statistics language, to make it easier for researchers in political science, civil society organisations and anti-corruption agencies to detect patterns of corruption risk in public procurement data. In this latest workshop in Ghana, which brought together students and researchers in mathematical sciences and political science as well as civil society groups, Danny showed participants how they could use these recently developed software tools to investigate "red flag" indicators of corruption risk in large open public procurement data. The event highlighted the potential impact this could have on the fight against corruption in Africa - freely available software tools tailored to public procurement data and a growing movement towards governments opening up their data. Interestingly the workshop was picked up by local media (the Ghana News Agency and the Ghana Times) which stressed its relevance to ongoing discussions in Ghana around open government data and in particular the Right to Information Bill.
Oxford Mathematician Andreas Sojmark, a DPhil student in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Partial Differential Equations has been awarded the Bar-Ilan Young Researcher Prize in Financial Mathematics. The prize is awarded to a PhD student or early career postdoctoral researcher for an outstanding paper in financial mathematics submitted for the Third Bar-Ilan Conference in Financial Mathematics.
A new mathematical award has been established in Hungary to honour the memory of talented Hungarian mathematician András Gács (1969-2009), a man famed for his popularity among students and his capacity to inspire the young. The committee of the András Gács Award aimed to reward young mathematicians (under the age of 46), who not only excelled in research, but also motivated students to pursue mathematics. Oxford Mathematician Gergely Röst, a Research Fellow of the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology, was one of the first two awardees. For nearly a decade Gergely has prepared the students of the Universtiy of Szeged for various international mathematics competitions. One of these is the National Scientific Students' Associations Conference, which is a biannual national contest of student research projects with more than 5000 participants. Gergely supervised a prize winning project in applied mathematics for four years in a row (2011, 2013, 2015, 2017).
The award ceremony took place in Budapest, in the Ceremonial Hall of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), during the traditional yearly Mathematician’s Concert.
Former Oxford Mathematician Jochen Kursawe, now in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, University of Manchester, has been awarded the Reinhart Heinrich Prize for his thesis on quantitative approaches to investigating epithelial morphogenesis. Jochen worked with Oxford Mathematician Ruth Baker and former Oxford colleague Alex Fletcher, now in the University of Sheffield, on the research.
The Reinhart Heinrich Prize is awarded annually by the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology(ESMTB).
Our latest book features the remarkable story of Ada Lovelace, often considered the world’s first computer programmer, as told in a new book co-written by Oxford Mathematicians Christopher Hollings and Ursula Martin together with colleague Adrian Rice from Randolph-Macon College.
A sheet of apparent doodles of dots and lines lay unrecognised in the Bodleian Library until Ursula Martin spotted what it was - a conversation between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage about finding patterns in networks, a very early forerunner of the sophisticated computer techniques used today by the likes of Google and Facebook. It is just one of the remarkable mathematical images to be found in the new book, 'Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist'.
Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852) was the daughter of poet Lord Byron and his highly educated wife, Anne Isabella. Active in Victorian London's social and scientific elite alongside Mary Somerville, Michael Faraday and Charles Dickens, Ada Lovelace became fascinated by the computing machines devised by Charles Babbage. A table of mathematical formulae sometimes called the ‘first programme’ occurs in her 1843 paper about his most ambitious invention, his unbuilt ‘Analytical Engine.’
Ada Lovelace had no access to formal school or university education but studied science and mathematics from a young age. This book uses previously unpublished archival material to explore her precocious childhood: her ideas for a steam-powered flying horse, pages from her mathematical notebooks, and penetrating questions about the science of rainbows. A remarkable correspondence course with the eminent mathematician Augustus De Morgan shows her developing into a gifted, perceptive and knowledgeable mathematician, not afraid to challenge her teacher over controversial ideas.
“Lovelace’s far sighted remarks about whether the machine might think, or compose music, still resonate today,” said Professor Martin. “This book shows how Ada Lovelace, with astonishing prescience, learned the maths she needed to understand the principles behind modern computing.”
Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist, by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice will be launched on 16th April 2018 by Bodleian Library Publishing, in partnership with the Clay Mathematics Institute.
The page of doodles is on display until February 2019 as part of the Bodleian Library’s exhibition 'Sappho to Suffrage: women who dared.'
Bringing together talks, workshops, hands-on activities and walking tours, the Oxford Maths Festival is an extravaganza of all the wonderful curiosities mathematics holds. Board games, sport, risk and the wisdom of crowds courtesy of Marcus du Sautoy are all on the menu.
Over two days you can immerse yourself in a wide range of events, with something for everyone, no matter what your age or prior mathematical experience.
All events are free to attend. Some require pre-booking. For the entire programme, please click here.
Oxford Mathematicians Alain Goriely and Mike Giles have been made Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Alain is recognised for his "contributions to nonlinear elasticity and theories of biological growth" while Mike receives his Fellowship for his "contributions to numerical analysis and scientific computing, particularly concerning adjoint methods, stochastic simulation, and Multilevel Monte Carlo."
Alain is Professor of Mathematical Modelling in the University of Oxford where he is Director of the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM) and Co-Director of the International Brain Mechanics and Trauma Lab (IBMTL). He is an applied mathematician with broad interests in mathematics, mechanics, sciences, and engineering. His current research also include the modelling of new photovoltaic devices, the modelling of cancer and the mechanics of the human brain. He is author of the recently published Applied Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction. Alain is also the founder of the successful Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture series. You can watch his recent Public Lecture, 'Can Mathematics Understand the Brain' here.
Mike is Professor of Scientific Computing in the University of Oxford. After working at MIT and the Oxford University Computing Laboratory on computational fluid dynamics applied to the analysis and design of gas turbines, he moved into computational finance and research on Monte Carlo methods for a variety of applications. His research focuses on improving the accuracy, efficiency and analysis of Monte Carlo methods. He is also interested in various aspects of scientific computing, including high performance parallel computing and has been working on the exploitation of GPUs (graphics processors) for a variety of financial, scientific and engineering applications.
Oxford Mathematician John Ball has won the European Academy of Sciences Leonardo da Vinci award. The award is given annually for outstanding lifetime scientific achievement. In the words of the Committee, "through a research career spanning more than 45 years, Professor Ball has made groundbreaking and highly significant contributions to the mathematical theory of elasticity, the calculus of variations, and the mathematical analysis of infinite-dimensional dynamical systems."
Sir John Ball FRS is Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations. He is a Fellow of The Queen's College.
The Oxford Summer School on Economic Networks, hosted by Oxford Mathematics and the Institute of New Economic Thinking, aims to bring together graduate students from a range of disciplines (maths, statistics, economics, policy, geography, development, ..) to learn about the techniques, applications and impact of network theory in economics and development.
We look forward to welcoming a large number of world renowned experts in economic networks and complexity science. Confirmed speakers for the 2018 edition include Fernando Vega-Redondo, Mihaela van der Schaar, Rama Cont, Doyne Farmer, Pete Grindrod, Renaud Lambiotte, Elsa Arcaute and Taha Yasseri. Tutorials and lectures include social networks, games and learning, financial networks, economic complexity and urban systems.
Alongside a rigorous academic schedule, the summer school also includes a walking tour of the historic university and city centre, a punting trip on the river Cherwell and a dinner in one of Oxford's historic colleges.
The deadline for applications is March 15th - more information is available here. Please contact us at @email with any questions.
'Euler's Pioneering Equation' has been compared to a Shakespearean Sonnet. But even if you don't buy that, Robin Wilson's book does much to show how an 18th century Swiss mathematician managed to bring together the five key constants in the subject: the number 1, the basis of our counting system; the concept of zero, which was a major development in mathematics, and opened up the idea of negative numbers; π an irrational number, the basis for the measurement of circles; the exponential e, associated with exponential growth and logarithms; and the imaginary number i, the square root of -1, the basis of complex numbers. Some achievement.
We are always being told that mathematics impacts every corner of our lives - our security, our climate, even our very selves. Want a quick summary of how? Alain Goriely's Applied Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction does just that, laying out the basics of the subject and exploring its range and potential. If you want to know how cooking a turkey and medical imaging are best explained by mathematics (or even if you don't) this is an excellent read.
By contrast Yves Capdeboscq together with colleague Giovanni S. Alberti from Genoa has published 'Lectures on Elliptic Methods For Hybrid Inverse Problems based on a series of 2014 lectures. Targeting the Graduate audience, this work tackles one of the most important aspects of the mathematical sciences: the Inverse Problem. In the words of the authors "Inverse problems correspond to the opposite (of a direct problem), namely to find the cause which generated the observed, measured result."
Click here for our last literary selection including Prime Numbers, Networks and Russian Mathematicians.
