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The Sutton Trust Summer School in Mathematics took place from 10th-15th July. The Sutton Trust has funded such summer schools since 1998, in various subjects including mathematics. This summer there were 28 Year 12 (lower sixth form) students chosen from 120 applicants - a number which is growing year on year. The students come from schools and families with little or no experience of Oxbridge or HE, as well as being selected on academic grounds. The academic programme for the week was run by Richard Earl and David Acheson, the aim being to give the students a sense of what university mathematics, and more generally what the whole university experience is like. The main lecture course was on cryptography, with other workshops concentrating on proof.

Seven new lecturers will be joining the department in October.

Ruth Baker (St Hugh's)

Ruth has just completed her D.Phil. at the Centre for Mathematical Biology, on the modelling of pattern formation in embryos. She takes up her full duties in 2010: until then, she will be supported in part by a Lloyd's Tercentenary Fellowship and in part by an RCUK Academic Fellowship.

Victor Flynn (New College)

Victor is currently a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Liverpool. His interests are in number theory of higher genus curves and their Jacobians.

Anne Henke (Pembroke)

Anne is currently a Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at Leicester. Her interests are in representation theory and Schur algebras.

Mike Monoyios (LMH)

Mike is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Finance at Brunel, currently on leave at Imperial. He is interested in optimal hedging strategies in the presence of risk and stochastic volatility modelling.

Alex Scott (Merton)

Alex is currently a Reader at UCL. His interests are in the broad area of Combinatorics, and its connections with computer science, probability theory and statistical physics.

Balazs Szendroi (St Peter's)

Balazs currently holds a Marie Curie Fellowship at Utrecht University. He is interested in algebraic geometry and its connections with physics, particularly with mirror symmetry in string theory.

Pierre Tarres (St Hugh's, initially joint with St Catherine's)

Pierre is currently a tenured CNRS Research Fellow at the Statistics and Probability Laboratory, Toulouse. He is interested in reinforced random walks and stochastic approximation.

Congratulations to Nick Trefethen of the Computing Laboratory's Numerical Analysis Group on his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society; also to Richard Ward of the University of Durham. Richard did his DPhil at the Institute under Roger Penrose, and was a JRF at Merton from 1977 to 1978.

It is very pleasing news that Raoul Bott has been elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. In the past, he was a frequent visitor to Michael Atiyah's group at the Institute.

Dr Bernd Kirchheim of the University of Oxford was awarded a Whitehead Prize for his fundamental work in several areas of real analysis. His results in geometric measure theory include a proof that rectifiable metric spaces have density one, a metric differentiation theorem, and a surprisingly powerful extension with Ambrosio of the Federer-Fleming theory of currents to general metric spaces. His results in the calculus of variations include a proof that the quasiconvex envelope of a continuously differentiable function remains continuously differentiable and a complete solution to the problem of existence of non-trivial Lipschitz self-maps of the plane whose gradients attain only finitely many values.

Marcus du Sautoy has been awarded a literary prize in Italy, the Peano Prize 2005 for the most readable book about mathematics published in Italian. Previous recipients have included Alain Connes and Keith Devlin.

Congratulations to Peter Grindrod, who is to be Visiting Professor in Industrial Mathematics for three years from July 2005

Marcus du Sautoy has been awarded a Senior Media Fellowship from the EPSRC. The fellowship will run for three years starting in October 2005. The aim of the fellowship is to continue the Institute's outreach activity by promoting mathematics on radio, TV and through the print media.

Four classes, each lasting 3 hours on Saturday mornings at the end of November and the beginning of December, were given for 40 year-9 (13 year-old) Oxfordshire school children. They were held at Queen's College. The lecturers were:

• Peter Neumann Challenges;
• Ian Tustian and David Wheeler (Warriner School, Banbury) Fill it up! --- maximisation problems
• David Acheson 1089 and all that
• Professor Sir Christopher Zeeman Gyroscopes and boomerangs.

Prof. Dominic Welsh will be a plenary speaker at the Combinatorics meeting organised by the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in Taupo next week.

Marcus du Sautoy is presenting Mind Games on BBC4 on Mondays at 9:00 and Wednesdays at 10:00.