News

The Mathematical Institute is pleased to announce the following awards for excellence in teaching.

• Group award (Mathematical Finance team) - Dr Jeff Dewynne, Dr Ben Hambly, Dr Sam Howison, Dr Michael Monoyios, and Dr Christoph Reisinger
• Individual awards - Dr Andrew Dancer, Dr Alan Day, Dr Anne Henke, Dr Glenys Luke, Dr Hilary Ockendon, Dr John Ockendon, Dr Zhongmin Qian

The Journal of Topology will publish papers of high quality and significance in topology, geometry and adjacent areas of mathematics. Interesting, important and often unexpected links connect topology and geometry with many other parts of mathematics, and the editors welcome submissions on exciting new advances concerning such links, as well as those in the core subject areas of the journal.

The first issue is now available.

Professor Martin Bridson has been appointed Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics from October 2007.

From 2-5 September 2007 OxMOS (New Frontiers in the Mathematics of Solids) and MULTIMAT (Multi-scale modelling and characterisation for phase transformations in advanced materials) will hold a joint meeting on Microstructure at St Anne's College, Oxford.

The main themes will be:

• New tools and concepts for the modelling and mathematical analysis of multiscale problems,
• materials characterisation and understanding and/or computation.

The programme will combine some longer talks by invited speakers (see below) and some shorter invited talks by participants.

Further information is available.

The 2007 Hughes Medal has been awarded to Professor Artur Ekert for his pioneering work on quantum cryptography and his many important contributions to the theory of quantum computation and other branches of quantum physics.

Further detail are available.

Congratulations to:

• Bryan Birch, who has been awarded the De Morgan Medal in recognition of his influential contributions to modern number theory. The LMS announcement says: `In particular, Professor Birch worked with Professor Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, of the University of Cambridge, to create a new area of arithmetic algebraic geometry. Together they formulated the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjectures. Despite the best efforts of some of the greatest mathematical minds these remarkable conjectures are still open after 40 years and are amongst seven classic unsolved mathematical problems identified by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Institute is offering $1 million prizes for their proofs.'
• Nikolay Nikolov, who has been awarded a Whitehead Prize for his significant contributions to group theory, in particular for several important advances in group theory, especially in profinite groups and asymptotic aspects of arithmetic groups and finite simple groups.
• Oliver Riordan, who joins the Institute in October. He has also been awarded a Whitehead Prize, for his major contributions to graph polynomials, random graphs, extremal combinatorics, models of large-scale real-world graphs, and percolation theory.

Oxford recently hosted the fourth Oxford-Princeton workshop in Finance, an offshoot of the Oxford-Princeton alliance.

Professor L.C. Woods died Oxford 15 April 2007.

For further details see the obiturary from The Independent written by John Ockendon.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an article about Marcus du Sautoy to conicide with his talk at Berkeley.

The first Brooke Benjamin Lecture in Fluid Dynamics will be given by Jerry Bona (University of Illinois, Chicago). The lecture will be at 5pm on Thursday 17 May, in L1 of the Mathematical Institute.

All are warmly invited to attend the lecture and reception that follows.

Further information available.