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Congratulations to Dr Catherine Wilkins from Oxford Mathematics who has won a MPLS (Mathematical Physical and Life Sciences Division) award for teaching excellence. Oxford Teaching Awards are given either to individuals or to teams as a public acknowledgement of excellence in teaching and learning.

Patrick Farrell, Early Career Research Fellow in Applied Mathematics in Oxford, together with colleagues from the Simula Research Laboratory and Imperial College London, has won this year's 2015 Wilkinson Prize. Their award was given for their work in developing dolfin-adjoint, a package which automatically derives and solves adjoint and tangent linear equations from high-level mathematical specifications of finite element discretisations of partial differential equations. The prize will be presented at ICIAM 2015 and will consist of $3000 plus a commemorative plaque for each winner.

The Wilkinson Prize was established to honour the outstanding contributions of Dr James Hardy Wilkinson to the field of numerical software. It is awarded every four years.

In April 2015, the London Mathematical Society's annual Women in Maths day 
was expanded to four days as part of the LMS 150th Anniversary celebrations, 
and was hosted by the Mathematical Institute in the Andrew Wiles Building.

The meeting was a huge success. About 430 school girls and teachers attended 
the days for school students, which featured talks, hands-on workshops and a 
mathematical treasure hunt around the building. A further 230 university 
mathematicians and mathematical scientists (undergraduates, graduate 
students, postdocs and faculty) attended the remaining two days, which 
included plenary lectures, contributed talks by graduate students and 
postdocs, posters by undergraduates and graduate students, panel 
discussions, lots of opportunities for networking, and even mathematical 
craft.

Participants from all four days brought small photos of themselves which 
formed a collage showcasing the present and future of women in mathematics 
in the UK. In addition, the school students (and indeed slightly 
older mathematicians) were encouraged to write questions on post-it notes 
that were addressed by other participants later in the week.

As one school student said, "Everyone else here likes maths!".  Participants 
from Thursday and Friday said "As an undergraduate you see how many 
different possibilities you can get into... there’s so much variety", and "It’s 
absolutely inspiring", and "the attendance speaks for itself – this is 
easily one of the best attended meetings in the LMS calendar... it’s totally 
wonderful."

For more information, including an albums of photos and a link to the 
programme, please see 
https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/events/conferences/women-maths

The event was made possible thanks to sponsorship from the Oxford Vice 
Chancellor's Diversity Fund, the London Mathematical Society, Oxford 
University Press, Schlumberger, Jane Street, and the three Oxford 
departments who organised the event (Mathematics, Statistics and Computer 
Science).

Photos by Jennifer Balakrishnan and video filmed and edited by Mareli Augustyn.

Drones may evoke fear and possibility in equal measure, but they also are capable of giving us fresh perspectives, in this case a fascinating journey around the architecture and mathematics of the Andrew Wiles Building, from the unique Penrose tiling at the entrance to the building to the Crystal in the interior which floods light in to the lecture area below and whose shape represents the frequencies of a vibrating drum.

Oxford Mathematician and Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Marcus du Sautoy can be seen at a range of festivals and events this summer.

On Monday May 10, Marcus is at the Royal Society in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company to explore the relationship between science and storytelling. Later in the month (28 & 29 May) he shares the stage at two events at the Hay festival, the first with acclaimed mathematician Cedric Villani, the second continuing the exploration of Narrative and Truth first discussed in Oxford in January with Ben Okri and Elleke Boehmer.

In June Marcus will be performing a new show at the Glastonbury Festival (26-28 June ) called Death by Numbers with a special appearance by Death himself. and at the Wilderness Festival from 6-9 August Marcus will be giving his popular lecture on the Num8er My5teries.

Marcus will also give talks at the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts from 15-18 June where he is the keynote speaker discussing 'Infinity and Beyond' and at the American and European Mathematical Societies Conference in Portugal, 10-13 June.

The word ‘chiral’ comes from the Greek word, kheir, which means ‘hand’. An object is said to be chiral if it cannot be superimposed on its mirror image. For instance, your hands are chiral. If you place your right hand over your left hand, it doesn’t fit – the thumbs stick out in opposite directions. And when you turn your hands to point them in the same direction the palm of your hand still looks different to the back of your hand. 

Chirality is all around us, The easiest chiral objects to spot are those that are spiralled, such as shells, horns, springs, spiral staircases, vines and so on. Some chemicals are chiral too, such as DNA, sucrose and carvone. Examples of how different chiral structures interact differently with the body are those that have an odour or taste. You can smell and taste things because you have receptors that pick up the smelly or tasty chemicals. The classical (and historically first) example of how different chiral forms interact via smell was carvone. One enantiomer smells of caraway seed whilst the other enantiomer smells of spearmint. 

In this film The Oxford Sparks team and Oxford Mathematician Alain Goriely go to the Museum of Natural History in Oxford to explore chirality, its uses and its part in explaining the shape and possible alternatives to our universe.

Congratulations to Philip Maini (pictured), Jonathan Pila and Alison Etheridge who have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society.

Congratulations also to Ben Hambly who has been elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

The Andrew Wiles Building, home to Oxford Mathematics, is a space where mathematics is embedded in the design, from the Penrose Paving to the two large interior crystals. However, it is also a space filled with light, a natural environment for art that works explicitly with light and colour. It is with this in mind that London-based artist Antoni Malinowski was commissioned to paint an art work on the white walls of the entrance area of the Building.

Antoni describes his work as follows:

"Each day the journey of light is registered on the two large white walls facing each other in the luminous foyer. My work begins by sensitising this background by applying a reflective paint made with mica ground to a fine pigment. Then on the south facing wall, using light absorbing pigments, I paint in colours related to the warm end of the spectrum - from red to yellow. These light wave subtractive earth pigments have been used by painters for around forty thousand years. 

On the north facing wall, other historical pigments like green earth, lapis lazuli and azurite to mark the cool end of the spectrum - from green to violet. An additional layer of brush strokes is painted with contemporary paint, made with nano technology interference pigments. These don’t absorb light, but bend the wavelengths. The interaction of these two ways in which colour is ‘produced’ create the dynamic of the paintings. The wall paintings appear very different from different viewing points and with different light conditions. The colour oscillates between darkness and light, appearing and disappearing, showing different sides of binary complementarities. One elongated thin line in each painting will contribute to the opening of the pictorial space - an invitation for an imaginary spatial journey.”

Nigel Hitchin, Minhyong Kim, Kobi Kremnizter, and Boris Zilber of Oxford,  Ivan Fesenko of the University of Nottingham, and international collaborators Mikhail Kapranov (IMPU Japan) and Fedor Bogomolov (NYU) have been awarded a £2.3 million grant from the EPSRC for their project on ‘Symmetries and Correspondences’.  

Together with a stellar team of visiting researchers, they aim to assemble into a single coherent framework ideas and techniques arising from the most recent developments in geometry, topology, number theory, mathematical physics, and logic. These will then be brought to bear on key themes of fundamental mathematics centred on the various approaches to non-abelian and/or higher-dimensional class field theory and the theory of L-functions. The goal is bring about substantial unity in the diversity of programmes at the interface of  higher geometric structures and long-standing questions of number theory and geometry.