When you watch the Olympics this Summer and admire the achievements of the medalists, ponder on the unknown number of people who may have done just as well if only they'd had the chance. Of course this is true of many fields of human endeavour. Take mathematics for instance. In a world of data overload, pandemics and cyber intrusion never have we needed all the mathematical talent we can muster. Yet many people are denied the opportunity, both at school and, as crucially, at research level.
This problem is especially acute in Sub-Saharan Africa which is where Mfano Africa comes in. Mfano Africa is a mentorship platform launched in August 2020 and which helps pre-PhD mathematics students to improve the quality of their postgraduate applications. And in June 2021, it has come (virtually) to Oxford via the Mfano Africa - Oxford Mathematics Virtual Mentorship Programme. This pilot aims to encourage a small cohort of 11 competitively recruited and promising pre-PhD students, based in Sub-Saharan Africa, who hope to continue PhD study within the mathematical sciences.
However, the best person to explain the project is Geoffrey Mboya, Founder and Director of Mfano Africa. Geoffrey is a PhD student here in Oxford Mathematics and a student of St Peter's College, Oxford. Over to you Geoffrey.
Oxford mathematical biologists, past and present, featured very prominently at the annual Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB) meeting held from 13-17 June and organised remotely from the University of California, Riverside. It was the largest ever conference in the field, with over 2,500 participants and more than 1,000 talks delivered by speakers from 47 countries. The conference had an unusual format, running 24 hours a day to cater for the worldwide audience.
The breadth of topics covered showed how the subject has developed and changed over the past 10 years. Mathematical models are now being increasingly used to inform biological understanding (here the term biology is used very broadly and encompasses medicine, ecology, and epidemiology) at a level of detail not seen before.
This leads to new modelling challenges, for example in developing ways to integrate the microscale detail of biological systems to derive mathematically tractable macroscale models. This, in turn, leads to new mathematical equations that require advances in analysis techniques. In addition, there was increasing emphasis on the use of data to validate models and this brings with it novel challenges in spatial statistics, parameter estimation and identifiability. A key theme of the conference was education and equality, diversity and inclusivity.
The conference began with Kit Yates, formerly of Oxford Mathematics' Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology (WCMB) and now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath, delivering a talk featuring the work that won him the Society’s Lee Segel Prize for the best paper published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. It ended with four of the prizes for best talk delivered in various sessions going to members of the WCMB.
Johannes Borgqvist was awarded a Postdoc Prize for his presentation “Symmetry methods for model-construction and analysis” and Aden Forrow won the Data-Driven Prize for his talk “Learning stochastic dynamics with measurement noise.” Duncan Martinson was awarded a Contributed Talk Prize for his presentation “Extracellular matrix remodelling by neural crest cells provides a robust signal for collective migration”, and Solveig van der Vegt won a student prize for her talk “Mathematical modelling of autoimmune myocarditis and the effects of immune checkpoint inhibitors”. In addition, Mohit Dalwadi from the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM) won a Contributed Talk Prize for his presentation “Emergent robustness of bacterial quorum sensing in fluid flow”, and former WCMB students Linus Schumacher (now at Edinburgh) and Jody Reimer (now at Utah) also won prizes.
Congratulations to Professor Alison Etheridge FRS who has been appointed as the new Chair of the Council for the Mathematical Sciences which represents the whole breadth of the mathematical sciences in the UK, with input from the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the London Mathematical Society (LMS), the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (EMS) and the Operational Research Society (ORS).
Mike Giles, Head of the Mathematical Institute in Oxford, said: "As Alison has a joint appointment in the Mathematical Institute and the Department of Statistics in Oxford (of which she is Head), as well as being chair of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) Mathematical Sciences panel, and serving on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), she is ideally qualified for this broad and important role."
Alison is Professor of Probability in Oxford, having worked at the Universities of Cambridge, Berkeley, Edinburgh and Queen Mary University London before returning to Oxford. Her interests have ranged from abstract mathematical problems to concrete applications with her recent work focused on mathematical modelling of population genetics.
The Athena Swan Charter is a framework which is used across the globe to support and transform gender equality within higher education (HE) and research.
In 2013 the Mathematical Institute received an Athena Swan Bronze Award for its work in addressing the issue of gender equality in its subject and working environment and, as a result of our work over the next four years, in 2017 we received the Silver Award. This year that Silver has been renewed and reflects the work put in as we strive for gender equality in a subject that, while predominantly still male, is becoming more balanced.
What have we done?
- We have Increased gender diversity across most student/staff groups, with female postgraduate numbers almost doubling. Given that these are the faculty of the future, In Oxford and elsewhere, this is very encouraging. We will continue to work on providing an environment that encourages those students to continue to progress in their careers.
- We are pleased with the ongoing success of our recent, prestigious Hooke and Titchmarsh Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, which attract a high number of women and provide an exceptional springboard into an independent academic career.
- We continue to work hard to engage and encourage young school-age female mathematicians. It All Adds Up, where we bring female school pupils together to meet other keen young mathematicians, is just one successful example. We are approaching 30% female undergraduate intake, in line with the number of female high-school students studying Further Maths at 'A' Level.
Charters such as Athena Swan work best when they make you think about what you do rather than being an end in themselves. That has been perhaps the most successful part of Athena Swan for us. We are integrating it into our strategic priorities and intertwining it with, for example, our Race Equality action plan.. Mathematics is a subject that had a lot of ground make up, but we and the wider mathematical world are making meaningful progress.
Oxford Mathematician Endre Süli's work is concerned with the analysis of numerical algorithms for the approximate solution of partial differential equations and the mathematical analysis of nonlinear partial differential equations in continuum mechanics.
Born in Yugoslavia, he was educated at the University of Belgrade and did his graduate work as a British Council Scholar at the University of Reading and at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He received his doctorate from the University of Belgrade in 1985. Endre is a Professor of Numerical Analysis at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.
Oxford Mathematics now has 29 Fellows of the Royal Society among its current and retired members: John Ball, Bryan Birch, Martin Bridson, Philip Candelas, Marcus du Sautoy, Artur Ekert, Alison Etheridge, Ian Grant, Ben Green, Roger Heath-Brown, Nigel Hitchin, Ehud Hrushovski, Ioan James, Dominic Joyce, Jon Keating, Frances Kirwan, Terry Lyons, Philip Maini, Vladimir Markovic, Jim Murray, John Ockendon, Roger Penrose, Jonathan Pila, Graeme Segal, Martin Taylor, Ulrike Tillmann, Nick Trefethen, Andrew Wiles, and Endre himself of course.
There are plenty of awards and prizes for senior mathematicians and scientists. But just as important, and maybe more so, are the awards for those just starting out.
SIGACT (Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory) is an international organisation that fosters and promotes the discovery and dissemination of high quality research in theoretical computer science. The Danny Lewin Best Student Paper award is presented by SIGACT each year at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.
Oxford DPhil Mathematician Zachary's winning paper is entitled “Separating Words and Trace Reconstruction.” A deterministic finite automaton is one of the most basic computational models in theoretical computer science. Telling two strings apart is one of the most basic computational tasks. In this paper, progress is made on an old problem of how efficiently one can tell two strings apart with a deterministic finite automaton. The proof methods surprisingly involve complex analysis and connections to other fundamental problems.
Mathematics underpins so much of our understanding of our world, whether it be its close relationship with the other Life Sciences or its wider influence on such things as how cities grow or how social media networks operate.
At Oxford Mathematics Open Days you'll get a real sense of where a maths degree can take you. Indeed, as well as Maths you may also want to consider our joint schools in Maths and Statistics, Maths and Computer Science and Maths and Philosophy.
These events will be online-only, with live broadcasts, pre-recorded content, and question-and-answer sessions with our tutors and current students. No registration is necessary.
The Anile-ECMI Prize is given to a young researcher for an excellent PhD thesis in industrial mathematics successfully submitted at a European university. It was established in honour of Professor Angelo Marcello Anile (1948-2007) of Catania, Italy and consists of a monetary prize of 2500 Euros and an invitation to give a talk at the ECMI 2021 conference on Wedneday 14 April.
In her DPhil (PhD), Bernadette investigated the use of topological data analysis for biological data. She developed methods to quantify the unique features of tumour blood vessel networks. Using persistent homology on experimental data from different imaging modalities, she validated known treatment effects on the networks and showed how the effects of radiation treatments alter the vascular structure.
In her thesis, Bernadette further applied persistent homology to functional networks from neuroscience experiments. To overcome computational challenges that are a major limitation in applications of persistent homology to real-world data, she researched the use of local computations of persistent homology and her results indicate that these can be used for outlier-robust subsampling from large and noisy data sets. In addition, she demonstrated that such computations can detect points located near geometric anomalies in data sampled from intersecting manifolds. This work has recently been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
Bernadette developed her research in close collaboration with Oxford Mathematicians Heather Harrington, Jared Tanner, Vidit Nanda, and Helen Byrne as well as Mason Porter (UCLA), biological collaborators from Oxford Radiation Oncology and industrial researchers from Roche.
In her current postdoc at Oxford Mathematics' Centre for Topological Data Analysis, Bernadette is looking at applying persistent homology to quantify the output from mathematical models of angiogenesis.
