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Dr David Acheson has been elected President of the Mathematical Association for 2010-11.

We are currently recruiting a Departmental Lecturer in Mathematical Finance.

This year's Nomura Lecture will be given by John Campbell, Harvard College Professor, Harvard University, on Thursday 20th May, 2010. The lecture will begin at 5pm (with refreshments before hand at 4.30pm) and the venue is The Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, Said Business School.
All are welcome.

Title: The Changing Risks of Government Bonds

Abstract: The covariance between nominal bonds and stocks has varied considerably over recent decades and has even switched sign. It has been predominantly positive in periods such as the late 1970s and early 1980s when the economy has experienced supply shocks and the central bank has lacked credibility. It has been predominantly negative in periods such as the 2000s when investors have feared weak aggregate demand and deflation. This lecture discusses the implications of changing bond risk for the shape of the yield curve, the risk premia on bonds, and the relative pricing of nominal and inflation-indexed bonds.

On Thursday, March 11, 2010, two physicists-GP-B Principal Investigator, Francis Everitt, from Stanford and Sir Roger Penrose from Oxford-will jointly be awarded the ninth annual Trotter Prize at Texas A&M University. The annual Trotter event includes both a cash prize to the recipient(s) and an endowed public lecture series.

The Trotter Prize in Information, Complexity and Inference is awarded annually for pioneering contributions to the understanding of the role of information, complexity and inference in illuminating the mechanisms and wonder of nature.

The Trotter Lecture seeks to reveal connections between science and religion, often viewed in academia as non-overlapping, if not rival, worldviews. For this year's Trotter Lecture, both Everitt and Penrose will speak on this topic. Everitt's talk, entitled "Mystery in Science, Reason is Religion," will explore how mystery and moral discipline permeate both science and religion and how reason affects each in the context of Christian faith. Penrose's talk, entitled " Did the Universe Have a Beginning?" will explore the philosophical implications of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), which Penrose offers as an alternative scheme to the prevailing Big Bang theory.

Following on from the university backbone networking problems earlier in the week, after which we have been experiencing significant problems with the wireless networks in Dartington House, we have experienced further networking problems today. We have been working closely with OUCS in order to track down the problems but unfortunately changes made today on our backbone connection at about 1:30pm resulted in a total loss of the unmanaged and printing networks between Dartington House and our other sites. This had the most effect on people within the building although could have caused difficult for some printing elsewhere. The problem was finally cleared about 4pm.

Investigations into the main networking problem are continuing and measures have been put in place both to mitigate the problems and assist in tracking the root causes.

These problems were resolved on Monday 15th March.

Tom Bridgeland elected to Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls.

Tyrone Rees, a graduate student in the Numerical Analysis Group, has just won a 1st prize in the student paper competition of the Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods (Colorado, USA).

Due to hardware problems, the wireless network in Dartington House is very unstable, it currently works intermittently. We are doing our best to keep it going, but need for the supplier to get back to us in order to resolve the problem.

These problems have been worked around during the last week and fully resolved today (Mon 15th March)

There was an unscheduled outage of the connections to the university backbone network this morning at about 7:45am resulting in disruption for up to an hour. Since the network connections between our five sites goes over the backbone this had an impact on the departmental systems. OUCS have identified the cause of the outage and resolved the issue. Departmental systems should generally be back in operation now, if you experience any problems please report them as normal.