An Oxford-led project to improve the lives of people living in cities in developing countries has been awarded £7 million.
An international team working on The PEAK Program and led by Professor Michael Keith, Co-Director of the University of Oxford Future of Cities programme and involving researchers from all four academic divisions across Oxford including Oxford Mathematicians Peter Grindrod and Neave Clery has received the grant from the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) funded through the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
The funds will be used over five years to foster a generation of urban scholars working in the field of humanities, science and social science to enable cities to meet the needs of their future inhabitants and help manage their growth. Michael Keith said “We aim to grow a new generation of interdisciplinary urbanists and a network of smarter cities working together across Africa, China, India, Colombia and the UK.”
In particular the mathematics of urban living, with a growing wave of data becoming available, and its potential input into policy, is a critical part of any future urban planning. The PEAK grant will support Neave and three other Oxford Mathematics Postdoctoral Researchers (PDRAs) who will spend time at partner sites abroad - in turn PDRAs from abroad will visit Oxford to share learning.
With the passing of Landon T. Clay on 29 July, Oxford Mathematics has lost a treasured friend whose committed support and generosity were key factors in the recent development of the Mathematical Institute. The support of Landon and his wife Lavinia was the indispensible mainstay of the project to create the magnificent new home for Oxford Mathematics in the Andrew Wiles Building; the building is a symbol of the enduring legacy of their insightful, incisive support for mathematics and science. Landon's membership of the University of Oxford's Chancellor’s Court of Benefactors also recognised the breadth of his support for many parts of the University, always with a sharp emphasis on supporting excellence.
Landon Clay was the Founder of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which has had a profoundly beneficial effect on the progress and appreciation of research into fundamental mathematics. He will perhaps be best remembered for his inspired creation of the Millennium Prizes: these have the crucial feature that they draw the public’s attention to the fundamental importance of the prize problems themselves, in contrast to the focus on the prize-winners as is the case with the other great prizes of mathematics.
The Clay Mathematics Institute, directed from the President’s Office in the Andrew Wiles Building, supports mathematical excellence in many other ways. In particular, the Clay Research Fellowships give the brightest young mathematicians in the world five years of freedom to develop their ideas free of financial concerns and institutional demands. The fruits of this programme can be implied from the fact that three of the four Fields Medallists at the International Congress in 2014 were former Clay Fellows.
The ramifications of Landon Clay’s generous and astutely directed support for mathematics will echo long into the future. A fuller account of his life and the range of his philanthropy can be found on the Clay Mathematics Institute website.
Ocford Mathematician Nick Trefethen FRS has been awarded the George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) "for the exceptionally well-expressed accumulated insights found in his books, papers, essays, and talks... His enthusiastic approach to his subject, his leadership, and his delight at the enlightenment achieved are unique and inspirational, motivating others to learn and do applied mathematics through the practical combination of deep analysis and algorithmic dexterity."
Nick is Professor of Numerical Analysis and Head of the Numerical Analysis Group here in Oxford.
Oxford Mathematicians Stephen Haben and Peter Grindrod and colleagues have won an outstanding certificate as part of the new IIF Tao Hong Award for papers in energy forecasting published in the International Journal of Forecasting.
The study of networks offers a fruitful approach to understanding human behaviour. Sanjeev Goyal is one of its pioneers. In this lecture Sanjeev presents a puzzle:
In social communities, the vast majority of individuals get their information from a very small subset of the group – the influencers, connectors, and opinion leaders. But empirical research suggests that there are only minor differences between the influencers and the others. Using mathematical modelling of individual activity and networking and experiments with human subjects, Sanjeev helps explain the puzzle and the economic trade-offs it contains.
Professor Sanjeev Goyal FBA is the Chair of the Economics Faculty at the University of Cambridge and was the founding Director of the Cambridge-INET Institute.
Congratulations to the Oxford Mathematicians who have just been awarded LMS prizes. Alex Wilkie receives the Pólya Prize for his profound contributions to model theory and to its connections with real analytic geometry and Alison Etheridge receives the Senior Anne Bennett Prize in recognition of her outstanding research on measure-valued stochastic processes and applications to population biology; and for her impressive leadership and service to the profession.
Professor Michael Duff of Imperial College London and Visiting Professor here in the Mathematical Institute in Oxford has been awarded the Dirac Medal and Prize for 2017 by the Institute of Physics for “sustained groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics including the discovery of Weyl anomalies, for having pioneered Kaluza-Klein supergravity, and for recognising that superstrings in 10 dimensions are merely a special case of p-branes in an 11-dimensional M-theory.”
Michael Duff holds a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics and was awarded the 2004 Meeting Gold Medal, El Colegio Nacional, Mexico.
The study of networks offers a fruitful approach to understanding human behaviour. Sanjeev Goyal is one of its pioneers. In this lecture Sanjeev presents a puzzle:
In social communities, the vast majority of individuals get their information from a very small subset of the group – the influencers, connectors, and opinion leaders. But empirical research suggests that there are only minor differences between the influencers and the others. Using mathematical modelling of individual activity and networking and experiments with human subjects, Sanjeev helps explain the puzzle and the economic trade-offs it contains.
Professor Sanjeev Goyal FBA is the Chair of the Economics Faculty at the University of Cambridge and was the founding Director of the Cambridge-INET Institute.
Oxford Mathematician Alison Etheridge FRS has been awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for Services to Science. Alison is Professor of Probability in Oxford and will take up the Presidency of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in August 2017.
Alison's research has a particular focus on mathematical models of population genetics, where she has been involved in efforts to understand the effects of spatial structure of populations on their patterns of genetic variation. She recently gave an Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture on the mathematical modelling of genes.
The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference in mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and hands out the most important prizes in the subject, notably the Fields Medals and the Nevanlinna and Gauss Prizes. At the Congress leading mathematicians are invited to present their research and in 2018 in Rio Oxford Mathematics will be represented by Mike Giles, Richard Haydon, Peter Keevash, Jochen Koenigsmann, James Maynard and Miguel Walsh, a team whose wide-ranging interests demonstrate both the strength of the subject in Oxford, but also the scope of mathematics in the 21st Century.
Miguel and James are also Clay Research Fellows. The Clay Mathematics Institute supports the work of leading researchers at various stages of their careers and organises conferences, workshops, and summer schools. The annual Research Award recognises contemporary breakthroughs in mathematics.
If you want to know more about the ICM, Oxford Mathematician Chris Hollings explains how even mathematics cannot escape politics.
