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If you are ever in the centre of Oxford and are getting tired of the endless beautiful buildings, then make your way to Wytham Woods. Covering 1000 acres of ancient and beautiful woodland 3 miles NW of Oxford, Wytham is exceptionally rich in flora and fauna, with over 500 species of plants, a wealth of woodland habitats, and 800 species of butterflies and moths. And it is so wonderfully peaceful.

But if you don't make it down to the woods today, you'll notice that Wytham Woods has come to Dunsinane (aka the Andrew Wiles Building, home to Oxford Mathematics). Wytham are celebrating 75 years of scientific research with a photographic exhibition on the Mezzanine level. You are very welcome.

It is a little known (and entirely untrue) fact that Isaac Newton's alchemical investigations led him to a formula for a potion to cure baldness. Ten mathematicians from Oxford and UCL spent Saturday night (and Sunday morning) running around central London solving puzzles and gathering clues and ingredients to recreate this potion, before a pedalo race across the Serpentine to present a vial of the wonder cure to the President of the Royal Society.

This wasn't just for fun (although it was certainly enormously enjoyable): the event was raising funds for the charity Raise Your Hands. The other teams, comprising the City's finest, were vying for a trophy, and the Oxford and UCL team (aka 'Crackers') of academics was there to set the benchmark. Which they achieved coming in as honorary winners within minutes of the trophy winners from Cantab Capital.

The puzzle hunt was inspired by a similar charity fundraising event in New York. Teams started at Banking Hall at 20.00 hours on Saturday night, and the first teams reached the finish line at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in Hyde Park just after 08.30 on Sunday morning. Each team had to collect three sets of alchemical information: from the criminal leader of the Chain Gang on the 7th floor of an NCP car park, from a celebrity businessman on level 32 of the Gherkin, and from a chemistry professor standing next to a statue of a goat in Spitalfields. 

All of which led the team to a street corner a few minutes from Tower Bridge where they had to assemble a marble run to decode the alchemical information into a list of ingredients. Three team members went off for a boat trip from Tower Pier, which led to a sequence of puzzles on the south side of the river. A quick call to criminal mastermind Ray then led the team to Newspaper Charlie on Tower Bridge, who was persuaded to hand over a newspaper containing clues to several more locations where the team found ingredients as diverse as apple pip oil and slumber dust. 

To get the butterfly tears, team members had to locate a group of mime artists on the South Bank near Waterloo Bridge and learn to mime, then race to Waterloo Vaults to add Newton's family crest to the walls of graffiti. Meanwhile other members of the team were getting apples in Borough Market, and solving a murder in a boxing club using a code written in blood on towels. No ordinary Saturday night.

From their various locations round London, the team gathered at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, to help police solve the mystery of the theft of Newton's flask. Having solved many further puzzles and pieced together the clues, the team identified the culprit and found the flask in her locker, along with the fourth and final piece of a puzzle cube, which revealed that a lab and chemist would be found at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. 

Cue a dash along to Carlton House Terrace, where the chemist combined the ingredients to produce a spectacular reaction and a long snaking coil of baldness-curing foam.  The team thought they'd finished, but instead had to take a vial of the potion along to the President of the Royal Society, who was fishing on the Serpentine.  Other teams were reaching the lake at a similar time, and there was a nail-biting pedalo race to the President to collect a certificate.  Then a final dash on a Santander bike to the Sackler Gallery, where the team found one last challenge: conduct an orchestra in a rendition of Bizet's Habanera, complete with violin solo.

Time for breakfast, while the other teams found their way to the finish line.  As though that wasn't exhausting enough, even after leaving to head home, the group on the train back to Oxford were working on filling in the details of one of the puzzles. The ultimate 'completer-finishers'.

This was an amazing experience, seeing London from a whole new perspective, with a diverse collection of ingenious puzzles, immersive theatre, and stamina and fitness elements - and all in a good cause. The Raise Your Hands fundraising page is still open. 

The Crackers team was captained by Oxford Prof Jon Chapman, and also featured Head of IT Waldemar Schlackow (Oxford), faculty members Ian Hewitt (Oxford), Vicky Neale (Oxford) and Karen Page (UCL), and graduate students James Aaronson (Oxford), Ed Goldsmith (UCL), Momchil Konstantinov (UCL), Johnny Nicholson (UCL) and Spike Smith (Oxford). 

Some of the team members are disappointed to confirm that Newton's potion does not in fact cure baldness.

Doing anything Saturday night? Well, if you are an Oxford Mathematician you might just be rushing around London learning to ballroom dance or trying to get your head around the sound wave patterns of a theremin or perhaps cracking a safe or two.

Why? The answer is Midnight Madness, a series of challenges which lead participants on an intellectual treasure hunt around London. Starting at 8pm on Saturday (May 19th), the madness lasts until high noon on Sunday. The Oxford team, together with colleagues from University College London will be competing against the brightest minds in the City. Will the academics prove superior or will years of mathematics have left them soft and contemplative against the sharp intellectual elbows of their opponents? The Oxford and UCL team has been selected via rigorous mathematical assessment (sort of) and features ageing Professors, puzzles gurus, as well as nimble (we hope) graduate students and our brilliant Head of IT. Hours have been spent coming up with a team name and logo (see image). But will it be enough? 

Midnight Madness is in aid of Raise Your Hands, which supports small, effective charities that improve the lives of children across the UK.

Public procurement – or government contracting – is critical to development, accounting for as much as 50% of government spending in developing countries. The procurement process is known to be highly prone to corruption, however corruption is difficult to detect or measure. A recent project led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with Sussex University and Government Transparency Institute has been using and implementing new methodologies for analysing large open public procurement datasets to detect ‘red flags’ that could indicate risks of corruption. Now, researchers from Oxford Mathematics are supporting the delivery of workshops in Africa to share these new methodologies and software tools with anti-corruption groups and researchers to enable them to analyse corruption risks in public procurement data.

Danny Parsons from the African Maths Initiative and Postdoctoral Research Assistant with Prof Balazs Szendroi at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford and Dr Elizabeth David-Barrett (Sussex University) delivered a 2-day workshop at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Ghana on Analysing Public Procurement Data for Corruption Risks. This workshop came out of an earlier collaboration between Dr David-Barrett, Dr Mihaly Fazekas (Government Transparency Institute), Prof Szendroi and Danny Parsons on data driven approaches to measuring corruption risks in government contracting. During that project Danny Parsons worked on implementing new methodologies for detecting corruption risks into an open source front end to the R statistics language, to make it easier for researchers in political science, civil society organisations and anti-corruption agencies to detect patterns of corruption risk in public procurement data. In this latest workshop in Ghana, which brought together students and researchers in mathematical sciences and political science as well as civil society groups, Danny showed participants how they could use these recently developed software tools to investigate "red flag" indicators of corruption risk in large open public procurement data. The event highlighted the potential impact this could have on the fight against corruption in Africa - freely available software tools tailored to public procurement data and a growing movement towards governments opening up their data. Interestingly the workshop was picked up by local media (the Ghana News Agency and the Ghana Times) which stressed its relevance to ongoing discussions in Ghana around open government data and in particular the Right to Information Bill.

Oxford Mathematician Andreas Sojmark, a DPhil student in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Partial Differential Equations has been awarded the Bar-Ilan Young Researcher Prize in Financial Mathematics. The prize is awarded to a PhD student or early career postdoctoral researcher for an outstanding paper in financial mathematics submitted for the Third Bar-Ilan Conference in Financial Mathematics.

Andreas' paper `An SPDE model for systemic risk with endogenous contagion' will be presented at the conference at the end of May.

A new mathematical award has been established in Hungary to honour the memory of talented Hungarian mathematician András Gács (1969-2009), a man famed for his popularity among students and his capacity to inspire the young. The committee of the András Gács Award aimed to reward young mathematicians (under the age of 46), who not only excelled in research, but also motivated students to pursue mathematics. Oxford Mathematician Gergely Röst, a Research Fellow of the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology, was one of the first two awardees. For nearly a decade Gergely has prepared the students of the Universtiy of Szeged for various international mathematics competitions. One of these is the National Scientific Students' Associations Conference, which is a biannual national contest of student research projects with more than 5000 participants. Gergely supervised a prize winning project in applied mathematics for four years in a row (2011, 2013, 2015, 2017).

The award ceremony took place in Budapest, in the Ceremonial Hall of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), during the traditional yearly Mathematician’s Concert. 

Former Oxford Mathematician Jochen Kursawe, now in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, University of Manchester, has been awarded the Reinhart Heinrich Prize for his thesis on quantitative approaches to investigating epithelial morphogenesis. Jochen worked with Oxford Mathematician Ruth Baker and former Oxford colleague Alex Fletcher, now in the University of Sheffield, on the research.

The Reinhart Heinrich Prize is awarded annually by the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ESMTB).

Our latest book features the remarkable story of Ada Lovelace, often considered the world’s first computer programmer, as told in a new book co-written by Oxford Mathematicians Christopher Hollings and Ursula Martin together with colleague Adrian Rice from Randolph-Macon College.

A sheet of apparent doodles of dots and lines lay unrecognised in the Bodleian Library until Ursula Martin spotted what it was - a conversation between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage about finding patterns in networks, a very early forerunner of the sophisticated computer techniques used today by the likes of Google and Facebook. It is just one of the remarkable mathematical images to be found in the new book, 'Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist'.

Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852) was the daughter of poet Lord Byron and his highly educated wife, Anne Isabella. Active in Victorian London's social and scientific elite alongside Mary Somerville, Michael Faraday and Charles Dickens, Ada Lovelace became fascinated by the computing machines devised by Charles Babbage.  A table of mathematical formulae sometimes called the ‘first programme’ occurs in her 1843 paper about his most ambitious invention, his unbuilt ‘Analytical Engine.’

Ada Lovelace had no access to formal school or university education but studied science and mathematics from a young age. This book uses previously unpublished archival material to explore her precocious childhood: her ideas for a steam-powered flying horse, pages from her mathematical notebooks, and penetrating questions about the science of rainbows. A remarkable correspondence course with the eminent mathematician Augustus De Morgan shows her developing into a gifted, perceptive and knowledgeable mathematician, not afraid to challenge her teacher over controversial ideas.

 “Lovelace’s far sighted remarks about whether the machine might think, or compose music, still resonate today,” said Professor Martin. “This book shows how Ada Lovelace, with astonishing prescience, learned the maths she needed to understand the principles behind modern computing.”

Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist, by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice will be launched on 16th April 2018 by Bodleian Library Publishing, in partnership with the Clay Mathematics Institute.  

The page of doodles is on display until February 2019 as part of the Bodleian Library’s exhibition 'Sappho to Suffrage: women who dared.'

Ursula Martin will be speaking at the Hay Festival and Edinburgh Book Festival.

Bringing together talks, workshops, hands-on activities and walking tours, the Oxford Maths Festival is an extravaganza of all the wonderful curiosities mathematics holds. Board games, sport, risk and the wisdom of crowds courtesy of Marcus du Sautoy are all on the menu.

Over two days you can immerse yourself in a wide range of events, with something for everyone, no matter what your age or prior mathematical experience. 

All events are free to attend. Some require pre-booking. For the entire programme, please click here.

Oxford Mathematicians Alain Goriely and Mike Giles have been made Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Alain is recognised for his "contributions to nonlinear elasticity and theories of biological growth" while Mike receives his Fellowship for his "contributions to numerical analysis and scientific computing, particularly concerning adjoint methods, stochastic simulation, and Multilevel Monte Carlo."

Alain is Professor of Mathematical Modelling in the University of Oxford where he is Director of the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM) and Co-Director of the International Brain Mechanics and Trauma Lab (IBMTL). He is an applied mathematician with broad interests in mathematics, mechanics, sciences, and engineering. His current research also include the modelling of new photovoltaic devices, the modelling of cancer and the mechanics of the human brain. He is author of the recently published Applied Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction. Alain is also the founder of the successful Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture series. You can watch his recent Public Lecture, 'Can Mathematics Understand the Brain' here.

Mike is Professor of Scientific Computing in the University of Oxford. After working at MIT and the Oxford University Computing Laboratory on computational fluid dynamics applied to the analysis and design of gas turbines, he moved into computational finance and research on Monte Carlo methods for a variety of applications. His research focuses on improving the accuracy, efficiency and analysis of Monte Carlo methods. He is also interested in various aspects of scientific computing, including high performance parallel computing and has been working on the exploitation of GPUs (graphics processors) for a variety of financial, scientific and engineering applications.