Latest news

Can mathematics really help us in our fight against infectious disease? Join Julia Gog as she explores some exciting current research areas where mathematics is being used to study pandemics, viruses and everything in between, with a particular focus on influenza.

Julia Gog is Professor of Mathematical Biology, University of Cambridge and David N Moore Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge.

Oxford Mathematician James Maynard has been appointed Research Professor and receives a Wolfson Merit Award from the Royal Society. The Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award is a prestigious award intended to attract or retain respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

Professor Maynard's project, 'Structure in the primes, with applications', aims to develop techniques to understand the statistical properties of the distribution of prime numbers - a central problem in number theory. The project consists of three large projects to be investigated over a five-year period. The projects follow the common theme of studying classical problems in analytic number theory by attempting to classify counter-examples, should they exist. This approach has been remarkably successful in analytic arguments, and is an example of a common connection between analysis, combinatorics and algebra. The underlying techniques also provide flexible and universal means of answering rigorously many real-world questions about primes.

James Maynard is one of the brightest young stars in world mathematics at the moment, having made dramatic advances in analytic number theory in the years immediately following his 2013 doctorate. These advances have brought him worldwide attention in mathematics and beyond. Just 30, he has already gained many markers of distinction, including the European Mathematical Society Prize, the Ramanujan Prize and the Whitehead Prize. He will be an invited speaker at the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. He also holds a Clay Research Fellowship (2013-18), the most prestigious early career position in world mathematics.

We are delighted to announce that Thaleia Zariphopoulou has been appointed as a Visiting Professor in the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford for three years from 1st November 2017.

Thaleia holds the Presidential Chair in Mathematics and is the V. H. Neuhaus Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2009-2012 she was the Oxford-Man Professor of Quantitative Finance here in Oxford and has remained in close contact with colleagues in the Mathematical Institute.

Thaleia's works spans financial mathematics, notably stochastic optimization and quantitative finance. She has held many visiting fellowships and in 2012 became a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) "for contributions to stochastic control and financial mathematics."

Oxford Mathematics now has up to 50 fully-funded studentships available each year for doctoral degrees. All home, EU and overseas  applicants are eligible to apply – up to 20 studentships each year will be available to applicants regardless of nationality.

Find out more about postgraduate study and research life in Oxford.

The Oxford Master’s in Mathematical Sciences (or 'OMMS') is now admitting students to start in October 2018.  This new master’s degree is run jointly by the Mathematical Institute and the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford.  For the first time we are able to offer students from across the world a masters course that draws on the full range of our research across the mathematical sciences, from fundamental themes in the core to interdisciplinary applications.

This MSc complements a range of other masters’ courses at Oxford - each of which has distinctive features and meets a specialised need.  Click for further details of mathematics and statistics courses at Oxford.

Prime numbers have intrigued, inspired and infuriated mathematicians for millennia and yet mathematicians' difficulty with answering simple questions about them reveals their depth and subtlety.

Vicky Neale describes recent progress towards proving the famous Twin Primes Conjecture and explains the very different ways in which these breakthroughs have been made - a solo mathematician working in isolation, a young mathematician displaying creativity at the start of a career, a large collaboration that reveals much about how mathematicians go about their work.

Vicky Neale is Whitehead Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Supernumerary Fellow at Balliol College.

Oxford Mathematician Dominic Vella has won one of this year's prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prizes. The award recognises the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising.

Dominic's research is concerned with various aspects of solid and fluid mechanics in general but with particular focus on the wrinkling of thin elastic objects and surface tension effects. You can see him discussing his work here.

The importance of a University's teaching may seem a given, but it has received additional scrutiny in the last twelve months via the Government's Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and more widely as part of a debate on what Universities should offer their students. Oxford has annual teaching awards, voted by its most demanding assessors, namely its students, and this year plenty of mathematicians - Faculty, Postdocs and Graduate students - featured in those awards. Here is a list of the winners, all of whom demonstrate that we are both a research and teaching University and that the two are inseparable.

Prof. Dan Ciubotaru - MPLS Individual Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching 
Dr Derek Goldrei,  Prof. Alex Scott, Dr David Seifert, Dr Phil Trinh, Prof. Andy Wathen - Departmental Teaching Award
Jamie Beacom, James Kwiecinski, Chris Nicholls, Lindon Roberts - Departmental Tutor/TA Teaching Award

In recognition of a lifetime's contribution across the mathematical sciences, we are initiating a series of annual Public Lectures in honour of Roger Penrose. The first lecture will be given by his long-time collaborator and friend Stephen Hawking on 27th October @5pm.

You will find the live podcast here (and also via the University of Oxford Facebook page).

Dame Frances Kirwan has been elected to the Savilian Professorship at the University of Oxford. Frances will be the 20th holder of the Savilian Chair (founded in 1619), and is the first woman to be elected to any of the historic chairs in mathematics.

Frances has received many honours including being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 (only the third female mathematician to attain this honour), and President of the London Mathematical Society from 2003-2005 (only the second female ever elected).

Frances' specialisation is algebraic and symplectic geometry, notably moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, geometric invariant theory (GIT), and the link between GIT and moment maps in symplectic geometry.