We are delighted to annouce that PROMYS Europe will take place in Oxford in July and August of this year. Building on the hugely successful PROMYS programmes in the USA, PROMYS Europe is a challenging programme designed to encourage mathematically ambitious secondary school students to explore the creative world of mathematics. PROMYS is about asking and answering challenging questions, hard work and experiencing the sheer pleasure and beauty of mathematics.
So what should you do if the dead should begin to rise? Dr Thomas Woolley talks to the BBC about avoidance strategies based on mathematical modelling, strategies that can be applied to understanding how infections such as swine flu, HIV and Ebola spread, not least because of the role of media reporting. The item is 3 hours and 17 minutes in to the programme. Thomas also spoke to American TV in Sacramento.
Our Mathematical Sciences submission to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, covering research from the Mathematical Institute and the Department of Statistics, has been ranked overall best in the UK. The outcomes, released today, gave Oxford Mathematical Sciences the top ranking for research publications and for the impact of our research outside academia, and the equal top ranking for our research environment.
This outstanding result reflects the extraordinary quality of our faculty and research fellows, as well as the breadth, depth and impact of our core and interdisciplinary research, all underpinned by the University of Oxford's investment in Mathematical Sciences in the last decade.
Intuition tells us that when you make holes in a solid, it makes the solid softer. As an extreme example, think of a cellulose sponge, which is made from a material that is essentially wood. While you can only bend, stretch or compress a piece of wood with difficulty, you can easily deform a sponge, because it is highly porous. This intuition agrees with classical mechanics theory. So Rob Style from Oxford Mathematics and colleagues were surprised to find that this doesn't work for soft materials. Taking soft rubber-like solids and filling them with lots of microscopic holes, they found that the more holes, the stiffer the solid became. In fact, mathematical modelling shows that this is controlled by similar physics to that which ensures that small bubbles always stay spherical.
The results are important as they suggest that soft composites (like rubbers or gels) can have lots of new, unexpected properties. For example, if you have a soft, expensive solid, you can save material and weight by filling it with micropores without the usual loss of strength or stiffness. Cells in the body can potentially use this effect to change the large-scale properties of biological tissue like cartilage or skin. The research also demonstrates that you can use this effect to cloak small objects elastically in soft materials so that you can't feel their presence by deforming the soft material - a task which has been considered almost impossible to achieve using simple materials.
What do you want on the front of your Christmas cards? It might seem an idle question, but many companies (and even people) give it serious thought. But surely not mathematicians?
Well maybe not, but mathematics and mathematicians are very versatile. You could say they are in everything we do. Have a look at our season's greetings e-card, courtesy of Roger Penrose's P1 Tiling and Willam Joseph's design.
Robin Wilson's entire history of mathematics in one hour, as illustrated by around 300 postage stamps featuring mathematics and mathematicians from across the world.
From Euclid to Euler, from Pythagoras to Poincaré, and from Fibonacci to the Fields Medals, all are featured in attractive, charming and sometimes bizarre stamps.
How has mathematics emerged over recent decades as the engine behind 21st century science? Professor Alain Goriely, Statutory Professor of Mathematical Modelling in Oxford, explains how mathematics provides the framework and models from which physicists, chemists, biologists, medics, engineers and economists build an understanding of our world and construct the tools to improve our lives.
In this lecture Sir Roger Penrose describes how crystalline symmetries are necessarily 2-fold, 3-fold, 4-fold, or 6-fold. Yet, in the 1970s, 5-fold, 8-fold, 10-fold and 12-fold, ‘almost’ crystalline patterns were found, often beautiful to behold.
These structures have influenced mathematicians and architects alike, notably in the new Mathematical Institute Building where Roger’s own unique non-repeating pattern adorns the entrance.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's Inaugural Oxford-Nie Financial Big Data Laboratory lecture is now online. We should welcome Big Data he argues and all the opportunities it brings, but we should also approach it with humility and humanity.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute. The Oxford-Nie Financial Big Data Laboratory was made possible by the generous support of Financial Data Technologies Ltd and is located in the Mathematical Institute in Oxford.
Professor Martin Bridson,Whitehead Professor of Mathematics, Vice Chairman of the Mathematical Institute and Fellow of Magdalen College, has been elected to the American Mathematical Society “for contributions to geometric group theory as well as its exposition, and for service to the mathematical community.” In addition to geometric group theory, Martin's main research interests lie in low-dimensional topology and the study of metric spaces of non-positive curvature.
