The second in the series of Student Lectures that we are making publicly available this Autumn is from Vicky Neale. Vicky is one of our most popular lecturers and this lecture is from her First Year Analysis course.
The course introduces students to a rigorous definition of convergence, allowing them to develop their previous understanding of sequences and series and to prove key results about convergence, leading on to subsequent Analysis courses addressing continuity, differentiability and integrability of functions.
All lectures are followed by tutorials where students meet their tutor in pairs to go through the lecture and associated worksheet.
Oxford Mathematics Online Public Lecture: Anna Seigal - Ideas for a Complex World
Thursday 19 November, 5-6pm. No need to register, watching details below (and the talk will stay up afterwards).
Humans have been processing information in the world for a long time, finding patterns and learning from our surroundings to solve problems. Today, scientists make sense of complex problems by gathering vast amounts of data, and analysing them with quantitative methods. These methods are important tools to understand the issues facing us: the spread of disease, climate change, or even political movements. But this quantitative toolbox can seem far removed from our individual approaches for processing information in our day-to-day lives. This disconnect and inaccessibility leads to the scientific tools becoming entangled in politics and questions of trust.
In this talk, Anna will describe how some of the ideas at the heart of science’s quantitative tools are familiar to us all. We’ll see how mathematics enables us to turn the ideas into tools. As a society, if we can better connect with the ideas driving this toolbox, we can see when to use (and not to use) the available tools, what’s missing from the toolbox, and how we might come up with new ideas to drive our future understanding of the world around us.
Anna Seigal is a Hooke Research Fellow in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at The Queen's College.
Fernando Alday has been appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford. The Rouse Ball Professorship of Mathematics is one of the senior chairs in the Mathematics Department in Oxford (and also in Cambridge). The two positions were founded in 1927 by a bequest from the mathematician W. W. Rouse Ball. Previous Rouse Ball Professors include Charles Coulson, Philip Candelas (the retiring Rouse Ball and best known for his work on String Theory) and recent Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose. The Rouse Ball Professor in Oxford is a Fellow of Wadham College.
Fernando Alday is an Argentinean Theoretical Physicist and Mathematician. He did his undergraduate at Centro Atomico Bariloche, Argentina, and his DPhil at SISSA, Italy, under the supervision of Edi Gava and Kumar Narain. He joined Oxford in 2010, after doing Postdocs at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and at the Institute for Advanced Study in the US.
Following the tradition of Rouse Ball chairs at Oxford, Fernando is well known for the development of mathematical tools to understand fundamental questions in Quantum Field Theory and Quantum Gravity. Fernando's most important contributions involve surprising dualities among different theories and observables in high energy theoretical physics. One of these dualities relates scattering amplitudes to minimal surfaces/soap bubbles in anti-de-Sitter space, while another, known as the AGT correspondence, relates correlation functions in a two-dimensional theory to the spectrum of four-dimensional gauge theories. More recently, Fernando has been developing mathematical tools to compute string and M-theory amplitudes in curved space-time, a subject still in its infancy.
Over the next few weeks we shall we making a wide range of our undergraduate lectures available via our YouTube channel to add to those that are already there. The aim is not to provide detailed tuition but to give an insight in to the student experience in Oxford. However, we will be putting up one full course as part of the Autumn series.
Topics covered will include First Year Analysis, Second Year Linear Algebra and Probability and Third Year Geometry of Surfaces and Mathematical History. We would add that all lectures are online this term, but some of the tutorials that are given by tutors to pairs of students on the back of the lectures are taking place in person.
So we start with Professor Derek Moulton and a lecture from his First Year Geometry course. As Derek says in his introduction, geometry is ubiquitous in mathematics. Why not take a look?
Yesterday over 5000 applicants took the Mathematics Admissions Test, the entrance test used for Undergraduate Mathematics at Oxford, and other courses at Oxford and Warwick University and Imperial College London.
It's a two and a half hour exam. Here (below) Dr James Munro gives you all the answers in 10 minutes.
Question paper available here. And yes, there was a typo in Q4. Full statement here.
Oxford Mathematician Robin Thompson has been awarded the Journal of Clinical Medicine “Outstanding Research Award 2020” for his contribution of using mathematical models to represent the epidemiological or evolutionary behavior of infectious disease outbreaks.
Robin's paper “Novel Coronavirus Outbreak in Wuhan, China, 2020: Intense Surveillance Is Vital for Preventing Sustained Transmission in New Locations” published in February 2020 was recognised as recommended reading by the World Health Organization. The aim of the paper was not only to generate forecasts of specific outbreaks but also to understand how diseases spread such that forecasts can be made, and control interventions can be planned with more precision.
In April Robin gave an Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture explaining for a general audience how mathematicians model infectious diseases. Much of the content has now passed in to common parlance. The lecture can be found below.
Much of the mathematics that is done throughout the world today is essentially European in style. This is a legacy of European colonialism, which saw the export around the globe of a specific approach to mathematics: one derived from the ideas of the ancient Greeks, and based firmly on the notion of proof.
Until recent decades, the study of the history of mathematics has tended to focus on the history of this European mathematics. However, other parts of the world have had, and continue to have, their own mathematical traditions, though in many cases little record remains of the individuals who were involved in these developments.
A series of new posters, to be displayed in the mezzanine of the Andrew Wiles Building and online, aims to provide a taste of the different types of mathematics that have appeared throughout the world, and to show that these are as much a part of the story of mathematics as the tales that are traditionally told of the prominent European mathematicians.
Oxford Mathematics Online Public Lecture
David Sumpter: How Learning Ten Equations Can Improve Your Life
Wednesday 28 October 2020
5.00-6.00pm
Is there a secret formula for becoming rich? Or for happiness? Or for becoming popular? Or for self-confidence and good judgement? David Sumpter answer these questions with an emphatic ‘Yes!' All YOU need are The Ten Equations.
In this lecture David will reveal three of these: the confidence equation that helps gamblers know when they have a winning strategy; the influencer equation that shapes our social interactions; and the learning equation that YouTube used to get us addicted to their videos. A small group of mathematicians have used these equations to revolutionise our world. Now you can use them too to better manage your time and make money, have a more balanced approach to your popularity and even to become a nicer person.
To order the book 'The Ten Equations That Rule the World' signed by David Sumpter from Blackwell's Bookshop, email @email by 15 November and they will provide you with all the information you need.
David Sumpter is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden.
Oxford Mathematician Heather Harrington 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.
Heather certainly fits that bill. She has already won the Whitehead and Adams prizes for her work which covers a range of topics in applied mathematics, including algebraic systems biology, inverse problems, computational biology, and information processing in biological and chemical systems. Heather is the Co-Director of the Centre for Topological Data Analysis in Oxford.
Heather said of the award: I'm really humbled and honoured to have received this prize. My research is only possible through extensive collaborative networks, and I'm very grateful to my collaborators. I am hoping the prize funds can go towards exploring new research ideas as well as supporting students interested in research careers at the interface between pure and applied mathematics.
Each of the 30 Prize Winners receives £100,000 which can be used over two or three years to advance their research.
Vicky Neale and David Acheson are two of Oxford Mathematics's most engaging and accessible speakers and writers, and they both have new books to prove it.
In Why Study Mathematics? Vicky describes the experience of studying mathematics at University as well as discussing the many benefits of a mathematics degree. Nick Higham, Royal Society Research Professor, University of Manchester, says, "I recommend it to all prospective maths students and their parents."
InThe Wonder Book of Geometry, this week's New Scientist 'Don't Miss' Book of the Week, David take us on a geometrical tour from Ancient Greece to the present day. Packed with illustrations, the book demonstrates why geometry is the spirit of mathematics.
Both books have a simple message: mathematics is dazzling; and it is also invaluable.
