Latest news

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.

Oxford Mathematics in partnership with the Science Museum is delighted to announce its first Public Lecture in London. World-renowned mathematician Andrew Wiles will be our speaker. Andrew will be talking about his current work and will also be in conversation with mathematician and broadcaster Hannah Fry after the lecture. Attendance is free.

28th November, 6.30pm, Science Museum, London, SW7 2DD

Please email @email to attend.

Oxford Mathematician Per-Gunnar Martinsson has been awarded the 2017 Germund Dahlquist Prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The Germund Dahlquist Prize is awarded for original contributions to fields associated with Germund Dahlquist, especially the numerical solution of differential equations and numerical methods for scientific computing.

The prize honors Martinsson for fundamental contributions to numerical analysis and scientific computing that are making a significant impact in data science applications. Specific contributions include his development of linear time algorithms for dense matrix operations related to multidimensional elliptic PDEs and integral equations; and he has made deep and innovative contributions to the development of probabilistic algorithms for the rapid solution of certain classes of large-scale linear algebra problems. 
 
Per-Gunnar is currently Professor of Numerical Analysis at the University of Oxford. Hear more from him in this Q & A.