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For this year’s Charles Simonyi Lecture on Friday 08 November we welcome Ian Lipkin the “World’s Greatest Virus Hunter” (Discover Magazine). Using his experience studying HIV/AIDS, SARS and pandemic influenza, Ian will review how bacteria, fungi and viruses cause illness, why new infections appear and the implications of the emerging field of microbiology.

Ian Lipkin is the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology, Professor of Neurology and Pathology, and Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University. He was also the scientific consultant for the Steven Soderbergh film Contagion.

Ian Lipkin will be introduced by Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at University of Oxford.

This event will take place in the Oxford Playhouse. To book please click here.

OxPDE Visting Professor Richard James has discovered a new shape-changing metal crystal, a prototype of a new family of smart materials that could be used in applications ranging from space vehicles to electronics to jet engines. Called a "martensite", the crystal has two different arrangements of atoms, switching seamlessly between them. The material was discovered by Dick and colleagues at the University of Minnesota as an outgrowth of joint work with Sir John Ball which identified certain mathematical relations which would potentially allow unusual patterns of microstructure.

Watch the video to find out more.

Congratulations to Tom Sanders for winning the prestigious European Prize in Combinatorics. The prize is established to recognise excellent contributions in Combinatorics, Discrete Mathematics and their Applications by young European researchers not older than 35. 

On Wednesday 27 November Professor John Toland from the Issac Newton Institute in Cambridge will give the Seventh Brooke Benjamin Lecture entitled "the fascination of what's difficult: Mathematical aspects of classical water wave theory from the past 20 years.'

Brooke Benjamin believed that mathematical proofs and data from carefully designed and executed experiments were two pillars upon which scientific progress rests. He made distinguished contributions to both.

Experimental observations about steady water waves have famously challenged mathematicians since Stokes and Scott-Russell in the 19th century and modern methods of global analysis are inadequate to answer the simplest of questions raised by careful numerical experiments in the 20th century.

This lecture concerns mathematical advances that have emerged since Brooke's untimely death in 1995 and elucidates important challenges that remain to the present day. Find out more.

Plenty of opportunities to see Marcus in action this autumn:

And as a (rationalist) Christmas treat he will be appearing at Nine Lesson and Carols for Godless People in December at London's Bloomsbury Theatre.

Watch Oxford Mathematicians, from students to teachers, discuss the study of this most beautiful and powerful of subjects. The film explains how to apply, the choices available, your day-to-day mathematical life including the tutorial system and your college life, and the world of opportunities that a maths degrees opens up.

The scientific programme of the International Congress of Mathematicians 2014 has been announced. Many congratulations to Ben Green and Jonathan Pila who have been invited to give two of the plenary lectures, and to Konstantin Ardakov, David Conlon, Terry Lyons and Tom Sanders who have been invited to give section lectures. The ICM 2014 will take place in Seoul, Korea, August 13-21.

Jan Obloj was awarded 1.2M Euro Starting Grant by the European Research Council for his project "Robust Financial Mathematics: model-ambigious framework for valuation and risk management". He is among the 11 mathematicians selected in the 2013 StG ERC call. Congratulations!

Martin Klimmek's doctoral thesis "On inverse problems in mathematical finance" won the 2012 Bruti-Liberati Prize. Congratulations!

The Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, has announced the appointment of 22 new Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders. Professors Steve Shkoller and John Wettlaufer from Oxford Mathematics were among the awardees, Steve for his analysis of moving free-boundary problems in fluid dynamics and John for his work on applicable physical mathematics at the interface.

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