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We are currently recruiting a Departmental Lecturer in Mathematical Finance.

This year's Nomura Lecture will be given by John Campbell, Harvard College Professor, Harvard University, on Thursday 20th May, 2010. The lecture will begin at 5pm (with refreshments before hand at 4.30pm) and the venue is The Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, Said Business School.
All are welcome.

Title: The Changing Risks of Government Bonds

Abstract: The covariance between nominal bonds and stocks has varied considerably over recent decades and has even switched sign. It has been predominantly positive in periods such as the late 1970s and early 1980s when the economy has experienced supply shocks and the central bank has lacked credibility. It has been predominantly negative in periods such as the 2000s when investors have feared weak aggregate demand and deflation. This lecture discusses the implications of changing bond risk for the shape of the yield curve, the risk premia on bonds, and the relative pricing of nominal and inflation-indexed bonds.

On Thursday, March 11, 2010, two physicists-GP-B Principal Investigator, Francis Everitt, from Stanford and Sir Roger Penrose from Oxford-will jointly be awarded the ninth annual Trotter Prize at Texas A&M University. The annual Trotter event includes both a cash prize to the recipient(s) and an endowed public lecture series.

The Trotter Prize in Information, Complexity and Inference is awarded annually for pioneering contributions to the understanding of the role of information, complexity and inference in illuminating the mechanisms and wonder of nature.

The Trotter Lecture seeks to reveal connections between science and religion, often viewed in academia as non-overlapping, if not rival, worldviews. For this year's Trotter Lecture, both Everitt and Penrose will speak on this topic. Everitt's talk, entitled "Mystery in Science, Reason is Religion," will explore how mystery and moral discipline permeate both science and religion and how reason affects each in the context of Christian faith. Penrose's talk, entitled " Did the Universe Have a Beginning?" will explore the philosophical implications of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), which Penrose offers as an alternative scheme to the prevailing Big Bang theory.

Tom Bridgeland elected to Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls.

Tyrone Rees, a graduate student in the Numerical Analysis Group, has just won a 1st prize in the student paper competition of the Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods (Colorado, USA).

This year the British Topology Meeting will take place in Merton College, Oxford, from Monday 6th to Wednesday 8th of September 2010. We hope that the meeting will be an opportunity to reinforce the strengths of the community of British topology and we aim to represent many of the facets of current topology. For more information please see the BTM webpage.

The event is being supported by the London Mathematical Society and Merton College.

Organisers: Jeffrey Giansiracusa ( @email ) and Oscar Randal-Williams ( @email )

Nomura International plc has recently renewed its sponsorship with an uplifted funding for the Nomura Centre for Mathematical Finance (NCMF) at the Mathematical Institute, for another five years, starting from April 2010. Xunyu Zhou, Nomura Professor of Mathematical Finance and the Director of NCMF, says, We are very pleased with the continuing partnership between Oxford and Nomura, which has become exemplary for academic-industry collaborations. It is also a great vote of confidence from Nomura in the rapidly expanding Mathematical Finance group in Oxford. The new funding will support among others the Nomura Chair, 2 Nomura Research Fellows, the annual Nomura Lecture, the weekly Nomura Seminar series, and academic visitors to the Centre.

The 2010 JPBM Communications Award is made to Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.

The JPBM (Joint Policy Board for Mathematics) is an umbrella organization for four major American mathematical societies: the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The JPBM Communications Award was established in 1988 to recognize journalists, mathematicians, and others who, on a sustained basis, bring mathematical ideas and information to non-mathematical audiences. The award recognizes a significant accumulated contribution to the public understanding of mathematics.

For the past fifteen years Professor du Sautoy has complemented his love of mathematical discovery with a passion for communicating mathematics to a broad public. He has reached hundreds of thousands through his books, television shows, and hundreds of articles and appearances in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. His 2003 book on the Riemann Hypothesis, entitled "The Music of the Primes", is a best-seller which has been translated into 10 languages. In his 2008 book "Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature", du Sautoy guides the reader through groups and symmetry, from Babylonia to moonshine theory, while at the same time giving an engaging glimpse into mathematicians' minds. His four part television, the Story of Maths, presents a fascinating look at the development of mathematics from the design of the pyramids in Egypt to Perelman's proof of Poincaré's Conjecture.

Whether it is talking about Beckham's choice of number on a sports radio program, explaining the work of the Abel prize winner on Norwegian television, writing a weekly math column for the London Times, hosting a television game show based on math puzzles, or delivering the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Marcus du Sautoy invariably seizes opportunities to make mathematics more accessible and more appealing.

Congratulations to Marcus du Sautoy on the award of an OBE for services to Science.

New Years Honours List 2010