Roger Penrose joint winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics

The 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their work on black holes. Oxford Mathematician Penrose is cited “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

Mike Giles, Head of the Mathematical Institute in Oxford, said "We are absolutely delighted for Roger - it is a wonderful recognition of his ground-breaking contributions to mathematical physics."

Roger himself said: "It is a huge honour to receive this Prize. In 1964 the existence of Black Holes was not properly appreciated. Since then they have become of increased importance in our understanding of the Universe and I believe this could increase in unexpected ways in the future."

Sir Roger Penrose is famous for his many contributions to the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology. In 1965 with his ground-breaking paper "Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities" he predicted the existence of black holes, astronomical objects so dense that the geometry of space-time becomes singular inside them and not even light can escape their gravitational attraction. This remains, to this day, one of the most astonishing consequences of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, and we now see that they do exist in nature.

Roger also pioneered the development of the mathematical theory that describes the structure of space-time and, together with Stephen Hawking, he developed singularity theorems that form the basis of the modern theory of black holes.  In parallel, he developed twistor theory as an approach to the quantization of space-time and gravity. It has since become a powerful tool across mathematics and has more recently impacted on physics in the form of 'twistor-string theory' as a tool for calculating scattering amplitudes for collider experiments. It is still actively pursued as an approach to quantum gravity.

He has made many other scientific contributions that, despite their recreational origin, have nevertheless had Nobel prize winning impact.  His quasi-periodic tilings have a crystallographically forbidden 5-fold symmetry. These have not only inspired much mathematical research, but were subsequently discovered by Schechtman in 1984 to be realised in quasi-crystals that can be made in the laboratory. Roger Penrose, together with his father, was the originator of Escher's famous and iconic impossible pictures. His theory of spin networks in his Adam's prize essay has become one of the pillars of 'loop quantum gravity' and now has a worldwide following. Amongst his most cited papers is the theory of generalised inverses of matrices that have applications from statistics through to engineering.

Another particularly influential strand has been his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics, both on realistic models of wave function collapse, and on time asymmetry therein and its relation to that in thermodynamics and in the big bang versus gravitational collapse. His early work in the ‘70s and ‘80s laid the foundations of what is now a worldwide endeavour.

Last, but not least, his books on popular science have provided a benchmark for how to engage with the layperson without trivialising the science.

Roger Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and a fellow of Wadham College in Oxford

Below are pictures from the Swedish Embassy in London where Roger was presented with his Nobel medal and diploma by the Swedish Ambassador on 8 December 2020.

In 2018 Roger Penrose gave an Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture where he outlined his latest thinking on Cosmology and in an interview with Hannah Fry talked about his career and how he wasn't always so far ahead of the game, especially when it came to arithmetic. The video is below the pictures.

 

Posted on 6 Oct 2020, 11:57am. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

Oxford Mathematics Online Public Lecture: Tim Harford - How to Make the World Add up. Thursday 8 October 5-6pm

Oxford Mathematics Online Public Lecture:Tim Harford - How to Make the World Add up

Thursday 8 October 2020
5.00-6.00pm

When was the last time you read a grand statement, accompanied by a large number, and wondered whether it could really be true?

Statistics are vital in helping us tell stories – we see them in the papers, on social media, and we hear them used in everyday conversation – and yet we doubt them more than ever. But numbers, in the right hands, have the power to change the world for the better. Contrary to popular belief, good statistics are not a trick, although they are a kind of magic. Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, or a microscope for a bacteriologist. If we are willing to let them, good statistics help us see things about the world around us and about ourselves.

Tim Harford is a senior columnist for the Financial Times, the presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less and is a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. His books include The Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy, Messy, and The Undercover Economist.

To order a personalised copy of Tim's book email @email, providing your name and contact phone number/email and the personalisation you would like. You can then pick up from 16/10 or contact Blackwell's on 01865 792792 from that date to pay and have it sent.

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The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.

Posted on 30 Sep 2020, 12:21pm. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

Oxford Mathematician and Fantasy Football winner kicks off the new Public Lecture season

The Premier League football season starts on 12 September and that means so does the Fantasy Premier League. So how are you going to play it this time? Need some tips? Joshua Bull from Oxford Mathematics won last season’s competition from nearly 8 million entrants. He kicks off the new Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture Season by telling you how. 

Fantasy Football is played by millions of people worldwide, and there are countless strategies that you can choose to try to beat your friends and win the game. But what’s the best way to play? Should you be patient and try to grind out a win, or are you better off taking some risks and going for glory? Should you pick players in brilliant form, or players with a great run of fixtures coming up? And what is this Fantasy Football thing anyway?

As with many of life’s deep questions, maths can help us shed some light on the answers. We’ll explore some classic mathematical problems which help us understand the world of Fantasy Football. We’ll apply some of the modelling techniques that mathematicians use in their research to the problem of finding better Fantasy Football management strategies. And - if we’re lucky - we’ll answer the big question: Can maths tell us how to win at Fantasy Football?

Joshua Bull is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Mathematical Institute in Oxford and the winner of the 2019-2020 Premier League Fantasy Football competition.

Watch live (no need to register):
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The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.

Posted on 1 Sep 2020, 12:53pm. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

Richard Wade and Erik Panzer awarded Royal Society University Research Fellowships

Oxford Mathematicians Richard Wade and Erik Panzer have been awarded Royal Society University Research Fellowships for 2020. The Research Fellowship scheme was established to identify outstanding early career scientists who have the potential to become leaders in their chosen fields and provide them with the opportunity to build an independent research career.

Ric's main research area is geometric group theory, particularly the study of free groups and their automorphisms. He's interested in invariants of groups coming from topology (like cohomology) and rigidity problems. He also looks at trees and their deformation spaces.

Erik's research interests cover the mathematics of perturbative quantum (field) theory, in particular Feynman integrals, deformation quantization and resummation.

 

Posted on 12 Aug 2020, 10:27am. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

Oxford Mathematician Josh Bull wins Fantasy Football Premier League (out of 8 million entrants)

You are an Ipswich Town fan, so you need some fantasy in your life (they are not very good just now for those of you who are not football fans). Oxford Mathematician Josh Bull is an Ipswich fan. So he entered the Fantasy Football Premier League along with 8 million others, some of whom might even have been mathematicians. 

Result? He won. 

His secret. Well, yes he is a mathematician, but his real secret was not to choose any players from Ipswich's local rivals Norwich. It worked. Norwich came bottom of the real Premier League.

Watch out soon for Josh's Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture on the best strategies for Fantasy Football success.

Posted on 11 Aug 2020, 3:11pm. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

James Maynard elected to Academia Europaea

Oxford Mathematicians James Maynard has been elected to Academia Europaea. He joins 13 other Oxford Mathematicians in the Academy which boasts 4000 members and 70 Nobel laureates. The Academy seeks the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages in the aforesaid subjects in Europe.

Still only 33, James Maynard is one of the brightest stars in world mathematics at the moment, having made dramatic advances in analytic number theory in recent years. A recent interview in Quanta Magazine delves in to James's work and his thinking.

Posted on 7 Aug 2020, 2:34pm. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

Bryan Birch awarded the Royal Society's Sylvester Medal for 2020

Oxford Mathematician Bryan Birch has been awarded the Royal Society's Sylvester Medal for 2020 for his work in driving the theory of elliptic curves through the Birch--Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and the theory of Heegner points. The Birch--Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is one of the Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Problems.

The Sylvester Medal is awarded annually for an outstanding researcher in the field of mathematics. The award was created in memory of the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester FRS who was Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford in the 1880s. It was first awarded in 1901. The medal is of bronze and is accompanied by a gift of £2,000. 

Bryan Birch was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge where as a doctoral student he proved Birch's theorem, one of the results to come out of the Hardy–Littlewood circle method; it shows that odd-degree rational forms in a large enough set of variables must have zeroes.

He then worked with Peter Swinnerton-Dyer on computations relating to the Hasse–Weil L-functions of elliptic curves. They formulated their conjecture relating the rank of an elliptic curve to the order of a certain zero of an L-function; it has been an influence on the development of number theory since the mid 1960s. They later introduced modular symbols. 

In later work he contributed to algebraic K-theory (Birch–Tate conjecture). He then formulated ideas on the role of Heegner points (he had been one of those reconsidering Kurt Heegner's original work, on the class number one problem, which had not initially gained acceptance). Birch put together the context in which the Gross–Zagier theorem was proved. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972; was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1993 and the De Morgan Medal in 2007. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Posted on 4 Aug 2020, 9:54am. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

Martin Bridson and Endre Suli elected to Academia Europaea

Oxford Mathematicians Martin Bridson and Endre Suli have been elected to Academia Europaea. The Academy seeks the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages in the aforesaid subjects in Europe.

Martin is Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics in Oxford. His research interests lie in geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, and spaces of non-positive curvature. He is also President of the Clay Mathematics Institute, a Fellow of Magdalen College and a former Head of the Mathematical Institute in Oxford.

Endre is Professor of Numerical Analyisis and a Fellow of Worcester College. His research interests include the mathematical and numerical analysis of nonlinear partial differential equations, and finite element methods.

 

Posted on 31 Jul 2020, 2:04pm. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

Gui-Qiang G Chen elected Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences

Oxford Mathematician Gui-Qiang G Chen has been elected Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. 

Gui-Qiang's main research areas lie in nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs), nonlinear analysis, and their applications to mechanics, geometry, other areas of mathematics and the other sciences.

He is Statutory Professor in the Analysis of Partial Differential Equations, Professorial Fellow of Keble College, Director, Oxford Centre for Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (OxPDE) and Director, EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Partial Differential Equations.

Posted on 17 Jul 2020, 11:55am. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.

Cristiana De Filippis awarded Gioacchino Iapichino prize by the Italian National Academy

Oxford Mathematician Cristiana De Filippis has been awarded this year’s Gioacchino Iapichino prize in Mathematical Analysis by the Italian National Academy, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The prize recognises outstanding contributions to the field by early-career mathematicians.

Cristiana has been a postgraduate student in the Oxford Centre for Nonlinear PDEs for the past 4 years and successfully defended her DPhil thesis in June 2020. Her research interests include the Calculus of Variations and Regularity Theory.

 

Posted on 17 Jul 2020, 11:35am. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.