Latest news

A ground breaking ceremony was held at noon on 2nd August 2011 to mark the official beginning of the construction phase for the new maths building.

See the new building section of the website for more information on the project including pictures showing how the building will look and time lapse movies showing recent activity on site.

Kostas Zygalakis (OCCAM) and Richard Norton (OxMoS) were awarded second prizes in the 2011 Leslie Fox Prize competition in Numerical Analysis. For details of the prize, and of the prize-winners' talks, see http://www.mims.manchester.ac.uk/events/workshops/FOX2011/ . Kostas works on numerical methods for stochastic differential equations, and Richard works on convergence analysis of planewave expansion methods for Schroedinger operators with discontinuous periodic potentials.

This coming Wednesday (27th July, 21:00) sees the return of Marcus Du Sautoy to our TV screens in his new BBC programme, The Code. The Code is a three-part TV series about maths in the world around us. The Code is also a treasure hunt!

Further details can be found at the programme website

Professor Caroline Series speaks on “Indra’s Pearls,” the patterns created by iterating conformal maps of the complex plane called Möbius transformations, and their connections with symmetry and self-similarity

Lecture in the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, followed by a reception at St Anne’s College

Further details and registration form
Registration closes on: Friday 8 July 2011

We are delighted to announce that three Oxford mathematicians have been awarded London Mathematical Society prizes this year: the Naylor Prize and Lecture to Bryce McLeod, the Senior Whitehead Prize to Jonathan Pila and a Whitehead Prize to Barbara Niethammer. Congratulations to them all.

Further details can be found on the LMS website

The 15th Biennial Oxford/Cambridge Applied Mathematics Meeting was won by Oxford.  The Woolly Owl Trophy is now back in the halls of OCIAM in Dartington House.

This event has taken place biennially since 1983. Fifteen minute talks are given by young researchers. They are judged by two distinguished academics from other institutions who award the winning university the coveted Woolly Owl.  However, this year there were three judges: John Harper (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ), Arash Yavari (Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA), Sharon Stephen (University of Birmingham, UK).

Speakers and talks are listed on the OCIAM web pages.  The next event will be hosted by Cambridge in 2013.

Yasemin Sengul, a recent graduate of the department, has won the Oxford University Graduate Photography Competition 2011. The picture and further details are available.

We are delighted to report the recent final stage approval of the Mathematical Institute new building by the University Council. With this approval, construction is set to commence later this summer with a projected two year build timeline. We plan to be settled in to the new building for the beginning of the 2013-14 academic year.

However, this does not mean that work to secure funding will cease. We aim to raise another £19.3M in addition to the £10.1M which has been raised to date. This will ensure that the department enters the new building in a good financial position, fully able to make the best use of the new, inspiring environment. We look forward to providing you with news and updates on the building as work progresses.

The 8th June 2011 is World IPv6 Day.

The department is showing its support for this event by enabling IPv6 connectivity to several of its websites:

• http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/
• http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/
• http://eprints.maths.ox.ac.uk/
• http://www.maths-in-industry.org/

The last unreserved IPv4 address blocks were allocated at the end of January 2011.

You can click here to see if you're accessing the Maths website via IPv6.

Over the last few years the department has increased its efforts to be greener in various ways, e.g. reducing the amount of energy it uses, wasting less, recycling more, donating old equipment to charities for reuse etc.

A Green IT system for desktop computers around the department was phased in at the beginning of 2010. The aim of the system design is to be as unobtrusive as possible whilst saving lots of energy. Based on feedback from users, monitoring user habits and other experience the system was thus designed to be fully automatic and hence does not rely on the user having to remember to turn off the PC (although they do need to logout). The system has been highly successful (the most successful within the university) and is the major contributor to a 23% reduction in the total electricity usage compared to 2009 figures available. The green IT system uses free tools and is well documented so others can make use of the work elsewhere.

Efforts have also been made to reduce the electricity consumed by air conditioning and heating around the department. With 3 old buildings all with different inefficiencies this is not always easy. However, the department has produced some common sense guidance for the use of air conditioning and heating, and where possible automatically manages the air conditioning systems.

The department is planning to move to a single new building on the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter site in Summer 2013. Green measures and energy efficiency have been at the heart of the design process from the beginning. Within the maths building space there will be a site wide energy centre utilising ground source heat pumps and a biomass boiler, and the majority of the building will be naturally ventilated. The building will also have facilities for secure bike parking and showering to further encourage cycling. The building is targeting BREEAM excellent standard.

On a related note the Oxfordshire Cycle Challenge is into its last week. So far not many people within the department have logged journeys but hopefully this will rise in the last few days to help both the departmental and overall university totals.