Oxford Mathematicians Ben Green and Alex Scott have been awarded European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants. The grants are one of the most prestigious and competitive research awards in the world, providing long-term funding to well-established, leading scientists and scholars who wish to pursue groundbreaking, high-risk projects that push the frontiers of knowledge. The grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme and are each worth up to €2.5 million over a period of five years. A record 3,329 proposals was submitted to the funding round this year, with 9.6% of proposals being selected for funding.
Ben Green’s project will explore questions in pure mathematics about patterns and structure within sets of whole numbers. The project brings together two areas of modern mathematics: additive combinatorics, which studies how sets of numbers behave when they are added together, and higher-order Fourier analysis, which can detect mathematical patterns beyond the reach of classical methods. Ultimately, this could open new ways to understand the hidden structure of numbers.
Ben (pictured left) said on receiving the grant: "it is great to have the approval of colleagues that obtaining an ERC Advanced Grant represents, and a pleasure to acknowledge the collaborators without whom a successful outcome would not have been possible. The grant itself will make it possible to assemble a team of talented early-career researchers in Oxford to work on problems I genuinely care about, and I look forward to starting the recruitment process."
Alex writes of his work: "the goal of my project is to develop new tools for understanding the structure of graphs and networks. For instance, what do we see locally in a large, complicated network? How can we piece together local structure to obtain global information? How do we handle approximate structure or noise? Problems of this type arise in many parts of mathematics and related fields. The project will both attack longstanding questions in the area such as the Erdos-Hajnal Conjecture, which concerns the subtle interaction between local and global structure, and lay foundations for the new area of coarse graph theory, which is concerned with the large-scale geometric structure of graphs.
"I’m delighted that the ERC has decided to fund this project, showing their support for fundamental mathematical research. I am very excited to have the time and resources to pursue this work, alongside a team of talented students and postdocs."