News

John Ball was elected to the Executive Board of the International Council for Science (ICSU) at its 30th General Assembly held in Rome 24 September - October 1, 2011.

As described on the IMU website,

"ICSU is the International Council of Science. Its members are scientific international unions and nations. Together with other partners including the United Nations and UNESCO, it plays a fundamental role in the research areas which require both massive collaboration and sharing of data, such as the global climate studies that supported the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which received the Nobel Prize in 2007. Such studies cannot take place without long term massive support allowing large scale collaboration of scientists across disciplines and countries, and archiving of data of previous studies, a support that cannot be provided locally at research institutions. The International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) is now an associate member of ICSU."

Xunyu Zhou, Nomura Professor of Mathematical Finance and Director of Nomura Centre for Mathematical Finance will give a plenary lecture during the 2012 Bachelier Congress in Sydney; http://www.bfs2012.com/

Mike Giles, Professor of Scientific Computing and a member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance will give a plenary lecture during MCQMC 2012, Tenth International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing, Sydney; http://www.mcqmc2012.unsw.edu.au/

Jan Obloj, University Research Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute and a member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance has been awarded the 2011 Bruti-Liberati Fellowship at University of Technology, Sydney and will deliver the Bruti-Liberati Plenary Lecture during the 2011 QMF Conference; http://www.qfrc.uts.edu.au/qmf/

Professor Jim Murray, former member of the Mathematical Institute and founder of the Centre for Mathematical Biology, will be presented with the 2011 Leonardo da Vinci Award of the European Academy of Sciences at a ceremony in Milan on 11th November.

See http://www.eurasc.org/docs/2011/Milano_invitation.pdf (Jim's citation is on page 5) for further details.

A ground breaking ceremony was held at noon on 2nd August 2011 to mark the official beginning of the construction phase for the new maths building.

See the new building section of the website for more information on the project including pictures showing how the building will look and time lapse movies showing recent activity on site.

Kostas Zygalakis (OCCAM) and Richard Norton (OxMoS) were awarded second prizes in the 2011 Leslie Fox Prize competition in Numerical Analysis. For details of the prize, and of the prize-winners' talks, see http://www.mims.manchester.ac.uk/events/workshops/FOX2011/ . Kostas works on numerical methods for stochastic differential equations, and Richard works on convergence analysis of planewave expansion methods for Schroedinger operators with discontinuous periodic potentials.

This coming Wednesday (27th July, 21:00) sees the return of Marcus Du Sautoy to our TV screens in his new BBC programme, The Code. The Code is a three-part TV series about maths in the world around us. The Code is also a treasure hunt!

Further details can be found at the programme website

Professor Caroline Series speaks on “Indra’s Pearls,” the patterns created by iterating conformal maps of the complex plane called Möbius transformations, and their connections with symmetry and self-similarity

Lecture in the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, followed by a reception at St Anne’s College

Further details and registration form
Registration closes on: Friday 8 July 2011

We are delighted to announce that three Oxford mathematicians have been awarded London Mathematical Society prizes this year: the Naylor Prize and Lecture to Bryce McLeod, the Senior Whitehead Prize to Jonathan Pila and a Whitehead Prize to Barbara Niethammer. Congratulations to them all.

Further details can be found on the LMS website