In the bleak, school-less midwinter, James Munro and his student crew have been keeping the maths going for high school students who want to step aside from the curriculum for an hour or so and peek round the corner at University Maths. Cue novels, (yes there is literature as well), dragons and your favourite graph.
The Oxford Online Maths Club is live and free for everyone, wherever you are, every Thursday at 16:30pm UK time. There are maths problems, puzzles, mini-lectures, and Q&A via the chat. It’s interactive, casual, and relaxed, with an emphasis on solving problems, building fluency and enjoying mathematics.
Oxford Mathematician Georgia Brennan has won a silver medal in the Mathematical Sciences category at STEM for Britain 2021 for her poster (extract in the image) on 'Mathematically Modelling Clearance in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Mathematical Drug Trial for the UK’s Protein Pandemic'.
STEM for Britain 2021 is a major scientific poster competition and exhibition which has been held in Parliament since 1997 (online this year), and is organised by the Parliamentary & Scientific Committee. Its aim is to give members of both Houses of Parliament an insight into the outstanding research work being undertaken in UK universities by early-career researchers.
Since 2010 UNIQ has been providing in person and, since 2018, digital Summer Schools for State School students in the UK. As a free access programme we prioritise students with good grades from backgrounds that are under-represented at Oxford and other highly selective universities.
231 UNIQ 2020 students have now received offers from the University of Oxford and we look forward to welcoming them here as Oxford undergraduates in September 2021. Each year 1 in 3 UNIQ students who apply to Oxford get offered a place, as compared to 1 in 5 state school students.
This year we are merging UNIQ Digital with the online summer school to offer one UNIQ programme to 2,500 students. UNIQ 2021 takes into account the disrupted learning students have suffered over the past year: the programme starts in April and offers sustained support for students over several months.
Oxford Mathematics together with Oxford Statistics will once again be a big part of UNIQ this year. Our main lectures are on Matrices & Markov Chains. So why not Enter the Matrix? (And if you don't know how to enter then you haven't been born, quite literally if you are in Year 12...).
Take a mathematician with an endless curiosity about the world around him & the capacity of his subject to interpret it, & you have Series 3 of our #WhatsonYourMind films: a Sam Howison Special featuring geometry, flying spiders, tennis, rain, Pascal's mystic hexagram &, of course, Professor Pointyhead.
Editor's note: #WhatsonYourMind is the opportunity for Oxford Mathematicians to let it all out in 58 seconds (2 seconds for credits).
Applications are now open for the University’s 2021 graduate access programmes: UNIQ+, & UNIQ+Digital.
Our graduate access programmes, open to all students in the UK, are designed to encourage and support talented undergraduates who would find continuing into postgraduate study a challenge for reasons other than their academic ability.
UNIQ+ remote internships offer paid summer research experience over six weeks, from 5 July 2021. Participants will work on research projects with regular support and supervision from Oxford students and staff, as well as training in key research skills. There are six projects in Maths ranging from 'Randomized algorithms in machine learning' to 'Investigating the size of Riemann zeta function.' The full list and more information about UNIQ+ can be found here.
In addition, from July to October 2021, UNIQ+ Digital will also offer students from under-represented groups a flexible, free and fully online programme of mentoring, events and digital content to support them all the way through from considering graduate study to submitting an application.
The deadline for all programmes is 12 midday on Friday 19 March 2021. For full information, including eligibility criteria, visit the Graduate Access webpages.
Oxford Mathematician Ulrike Tillmann FRS has been appointed Director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences and N.M. Rothschild & Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The Issac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences is the UK's national research institute for mathematics. She will take up the post on 1 October 2021 while continuing to work part-time in the Mathematical Institute in Oxford to continue her research collaborations.
Ulrike's research interests lie in Algebraic Topology and its applications. Her work on the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and manifolds of higher dimensions has been inspired by problems in quantum physics and string theory. More recently her work has broadened into areas of data science and she co-leads the Oxford Centre for Topology and Data Science. She is a Fellow of Merton College.
Ulrike is well-known for her many contributions to the broader mathematical community, serving on a range of scientific boards including membership of the Council of the Royal Society. She will become President of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) in November 2021.
So what is on the mind of a mathematician, and specifically an Oxford Mathematician? Always their research? Or maybe nothing of the sort?
Our #WhatsonYourMind films take us inside those minds, young and less young, for 60 seconds. There is a lot going on, including the search for beauty, patterns in biology and data, the puzzle of parked cars in London streets, the damage caused by mathematical conferences, and the difficulties of teaching maths to the young.
The first series, a compilation of the first 13 films, is out now (see below).
Oxford Mathematics Online Public Lecture in Partnership with Wadham College celebrating Roger Penrose's Nobel Prize
Spacetime Singularities - Roger Penrose, Dennis Lehmkuhl and Melvyn Bragg
Tuesday 16 February 2021
5.00-6.30pm
Dennis Lehmkuhl: From Schwarzschild’s singularity and Hadamard’s catastrophe to Penrose’s trapped surfaces
Roger Penrose: Spacetime singularities - to be or not to be?
Roger Penrose & Melvyn Bragg: In conversation
What are spacetime singularities? Do they exist in nature or are they artefacts of our theoretical reasoning? Most importantly, if we accept the general theory of relativity, our best theory of space, time, and gravity, do we then also have to accept the existence of spacetime singularities?
In this special lecture, Sir Roger Penrose, 2020 Nobel Laureate for Physics, will give an extended version of his Nobel Prize Lecture, describing his path to the first general singularity theorem of general relativity, and to the ideas that sprung from this theorem, notably the basis for the existence of Black Holes. He will be introduced by Dennis Lehmkuhl whose talk will describe how the concept of a spacetime singularity developed prior to Roger's work, in work by Einstein and others, and how much of a game changer the first singularity theorem really was.
The lectures will be followed by an interview with Roger by Melvyn Bragg.
Roger Penrose is the 2020 Nobel Laureate for Physics and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor in Oxford; Dennis Lehmkuhl is Lichtenberg Professor of History and Philosophy of Physics at the University of Bonn and one of the Editors of Albert Einstein's Collected Papers: Melvyn Bragg is a broadcaster and author best known for his work as editor and presenter of the South Bank Show and In Our Time.
The future is full of uncertainty, but we still need to make plans and decisions based on the data we have. Where should a hospital invest its resources to allow for changing health needs in a year's time? Should the supermarket order extra ice cream because the summer will be warm and sunny? Should the council road maintenance team get extra gritting salt ready for an icy winter? Making predictions is hard - and maths can help, as we’ll see in this interactive webinar.
Maths Makes a Difference is a collaboration between the Mathematics outreach teams at Oxford and Cambridge. This interactive webinar series for students in Year 12 at state schools in the UK (and Year 10 later in the year) will explore aspects of maths that make a difference to the world and society. More information and registration.
The webinars will be led by Claire Metcalfe from Cambridge and Vicky Neale from Oxford.
