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Congratulations to Oxford Mathematics' Zubin Siganporia who has won the award for Outstanding Tutor for the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division in the 2016 Oxford University Student Union Student Led Teaching Awards.

The work of Oxford University Professor Sir Andrew Wiles was celebrated as having 'heralded a new era in number theory' as he received the top international prize for mathematics. 

Sir Andrew received the 2016 Abel Prize from Crown Prince Hakon of Norway at the prize ceremony in Oslo on 24 May. He was awarded the prize 'for his stunning proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory'.

The ceremony at the University Aula was attended by more than 400 guests, from members of the international mathematics community to local residents. 

Professor Ole Sejersted, President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which presents the Abel Prize, said: 'Mathematicians have tried to prove Fermat's Last Theorem for 350 years, without success, indicating that mathematicians regard this as one of the great mathematical puzzles.

'The Abel Committee says that Sir Andrew's work has heralded a new era in number theory. To me, this indicates that the work on the theorem required the development of an entirely new mathematical foundation, the significance of which goes far beyond the actual proving of the theorem.'

Accepting the prize, Sir Andrew Wiles said: 'As a ten-year-old eager to explore mathematics I rummaged in the popular mathematics section of my local public library and found a copy of a book called The Last Problem by E.T. Bell. I did not even have to open the book. On the bright yellow front cover it told the story of the 1907 Wolfskehl prize offered for the solution of a famous mathematical problem. The problem itself was on the back cover. I was hooked.

'It was a wonderful find for me. Apparently inside mathematics there was hidden treasure! A little over 300 years previously a Frenchman by the name of Pierre de Fermat had solved a beautiful sounding problem, but he had buried the proof and now there was a prize for finding it!

'Fermat did not leave any clues because he did not have a solution, but nature itself leaves clues. I just had to find them. There was never going to be a one-line proof. Nor do proofs come just because one has been born with mathematical perfect pitch. There is no such thing. One has to spend years mastering the problem so that it becomes second nature. Then, and only then, after years of preparation is one's intuition so strong that the answer can come in a flash.

'These eureka moments are what a mathematician lives for; the bursts of creativity that are all the more precious for the years of hard work that go into them. The moment in the morning of September 1994 when I resolved my last problem is a moment I will never forget.'

Fermat's Last Theorem had been widely regarded by many mathematicians as seemingly intractable. First formulated by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, it states:

There are no whole number solutions to the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ  when n is greater than 2, unless xyz=0.

Fermat himself claimed to have found a proof for the theorem but said that the margin of the text he was making notes on was not wide enough to contain it. After seven years of intense study in private at Princeton University, Sir Andrew announced he had found a proof in 1993, combining three complex mathematical fields – modular forms, elliptic curves and Galois representations.

Sir Andrew not only solved the long-standing puzzle of the theorem, but in doing so he created entirely new directions in mathematics, which have proved invaluable to other scientists in the years since his discovery. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters said in its citation: 'Few results have as rich a mathematical history and as dramatic a proof as Fermat's Last Theorem.'

The Abel Prize is named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802-29) and was established in 2001 to recognize pioneering scientific achievements in mathematics. Abel himself did some of the early work on the properties of elliptical functions. Previous winners of the Prize include Britain's Sir Michael Atiyah and the late US mathematician John Nash.

Accompanying the prize-giving ceremony is a series of 'Abel week' activities aimed particularly at young people, including the awarding of the Holcombe Memorial Prize for an outstanding teacher of mathematics and the UngeAbel contest for teams of secondary pupils. This year's winning teacher and young winners were in the audience for the Abel Prize ceremony. 

The rolling of dice in a casino, Heisenberg's uncertainty, the meaning of consciousness. All are explored as Marcus takes us on a personal journey into the realms of the scientific unknown. Are we forever incapable of understanding all of the world around us or is it perhaps just a question of language, not having the right words to describe what we see?

What is a network and how can you use mathematics to unravel the relationships between a variety of different things? How can this understanding then be applied to a range of different settings?

In this Oxford Sparks podcast Oxford Mathematician Mason Porter studies how things are connected using mathematics. He builds up models of these connections to represent them as networks. But what are the basic components of a network? In the podcast Mason describes how from social networks to transport systems to locating a lost umbrella, the mathematics of networks can be used to address a range of apparently unconnected problems and how organisations around the world are using them to penetrate their ever-growing mass of data.

Congratulations to Oxford Mathematicians Martin Bridson, Marcus du Sautoy and Artur Ekert who have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Martin is Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics, a Fellow of Magdalen College and Head of the Mathematical Institute in Oxford. He has been elected for his many distinguished contributions to group theory and topology. Marcus is Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and a Fellow of New College and has been elected for his outstanding achievements in promoting the understanding of science and mathematics to a global audience and for eminent research that has completely transformed the study of zeta functions of groups. Artur is Professor of Quantum Physics at the Mathematical Institute and a Fellow of Merton College.  Artur has been elected FRS for his work on quantum physics, quantum computation and cryptography.

Appearing everywhere from state-of-the-art cryptosystems to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, elliptic curves play an important role in modern society and are the subject of much research in number theory today. Jennifer Balakrishnan, a researcher working in number theory, explains more in the latest in our Oxford Mathematics Alphabet.

Oxford Mathematician Rob Style has been awarded the 2016 Adhesion Society Young Scientist Award, sponsored by the Adhesion and Sealant Council, for his fundamental contributions to our understanding of the coupling of surfaces tension to elastic deformation.  Rob researches the mechanics of very soft solids like gels and rubber, in particular investigating why they don’t obey the same rules as hard materials that are more traditionally used by engineers.

Oxford Mathematician Jake Taylor King has won the Lee Segel Prize for Best Student Paper for his paper 'From birds to bacteria: Generalised velocity jump processes with resting states.' Jake worked on his research with Professor Jon Chapman. The prize is awarded annually by the Society for Mathematical Biology. One of Jake's co-authors on the paper, Gabs Rosser, previously also studied Mathematics at Oxford in the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology.

Oxford Mathematician Linus Schumacher has won the prestigious Reinhart Heinrich Doctoral Thesis Award. The award is presented annually to the student submitting the best doctoral thesis in any area of Mathematical and Theoretical Biology. 

In the judges' view "Linus' thesis is an outstanding example of how mathematical modelling and analysis that is kept close to the experimental system can contribute efficiently to advance the understanding of complex biological questions. The roles of cellular heterogeneity, microenvironmental cues and cell-to-cell interactions, which are common themes in the study of biomedical systems, are skillfully dissected and analysed in relevant experimental model systems, leading to significant advances in the current understanding of said systems."

The judges concluded: "the modelling aims to derive generic, theoretical insights from specific, biological questions. The work has led to a number of excellent publications."

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has announced that Professors Xunyu Zhou and Endre Suli from Oxford Mathematics are among its newly elected Fellows for 2016.

SIAM exists to ensure the strongest interactions between mathematics and other scientific and technological communities through membership activities, publication of journals and books, and conferences.