News

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).

This year the British Topology Meeting will take place in Merton College, Oxford, from Monday 6th to Wednesday 8th of September 2010. We hope that the meeting will be an opportunity to reinforce the strengths of the community of British topology and we aim to represent many of the facets of current topology. For more information please see the BTM webpage.

The event is being supported by the London Mathematical Society and Merton College.

Organisers: Jeffrey Giansiracusa ( @email ) and Oscar Randal-Williams ( @email )

Nomura International plc has recently renewed its sponsorship with an uplifted funding for the Nomura Centre for Mathematical Finance (NCMF) at the Mathematical Institute, for another five years, starting from April 2010. Xunyu Zhou, Nomura Professor of Mathematical Finance and the Director of NCMF, says, We are very pleased with the continuing partnership between Oxford and Nomura, which has become exemplary for academic-industry collaborations. It is also a great vote of confidence from Nomura in the rapidly expanding Mathematical Finance group in Oxford. The new funding will support among others the Nomura Chair, 2 Nomura Research Fellows, the annual Nomura Lecture, the weekly Nomura Seminar series, and academic visitors to the Centre.

The 2010 JPBM Communications Award is made to Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.

The JPBM (Joint Policy Board for Mathematics) is an umbrella organization for four major American mathematical societies: the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The JPBM Communications Award was established in 1988 to recognize journalists, mathematicians, and others who, on a sustained basis, bring mathematical ideas and information to non-mathematical audiences. The award recognizes a significant accumulated contribution to the public understanding of mathematics.

For the past fifteen years Professor du Sautoy has complemented his love of mathematical discovery with a passion for communicating mathematics to a broad public. He has reached hundreds of thousands through his books, television shows, and hundreds of articles and appearances in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. His 2003 book on the Riemann Hypothesis, entitled "The Music of the Primes", is a best-seller which has been translated into 10 languages. In his 2008 book "Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature", du Sautoy guides the reader through groups and symmetry, from Babylonia to moonshine theory, while at the same time giving an engaging glimpse into mathematicians' minds. His four part television, the Story of Maths, presents a fascinating look at the development of mathematics from the design of the pyramids in Egypt to Perelman's proof of Poincaré's Conjecture.

Whether it is talking about Beckham's choice of number on a sports radio program, explaining the work of the Abel prize winner on Norwegian television, writing a weekly math column for the London Times, hosting a television game show based on math puzzles, or delivering the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Marcus du Sautoy invariably seizes opportunities to make mathematics more accessible and more appealing.

Congratulations to Marcus du Sautoy on the award of an OBE for services to Science.

New Years Honours List 2010

Nick Trefethen, Professor of Numerical Analysis, has been announced as the President-Elect of SIAM.

The 1st Columbia-Oxford Joint Workshop in Mathematical Finance will be held on 28-29 June, 2010, at Columbia, New York.