Oxford Mathematician Andreas Sojmark, a DPhil student in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Partial Differential Equations has been awarded the Bar-Ilan Young Researcher Prize in Financial Mathematics. The prize is awarded to a PhD student or early career postdoctoral researcher for an outstanding paper in financial mathematics submitted for the Third Bar-Ilan Conference in Financial Mathematics.

Everyday life tells us that curved objects may have two stable states: a contact lens (or the spherical cap obtained by cutting a tennis ball, see picture) can be turned ‘inside out’. Heuristically, this is because the act of turning the object inside out keeps the central line of the object the same length (the centreline does not stretch significantly). Such deformations are called ‘isometries’ and the ‘turning inside out’ (or everted) isometry of a thin shell is often referred to as mirror buckling.

Cycling science is a lucrative and competitive industry in which small advantages are often the difference between winning and losing. For example, the 2017 Tour de France was won by a margin of less than one minute for a total race time of more than 86 hours. Such incremental improvements in performance come from a wide range of specialists, including sports scientists, engineers, and dieticians. How can mathematics assist us?

Oxford Mathematician Ilya Chevyrev talks about his research into using stochastic analysis to understand complex systems.