Latest news

We are delighted to announce PROMYS Europe Connect for 2021, online from 12 July to 6 August.

In view of continuing restrictions and uncertainty around Covid-19, we are designing PROMYS Europe Connect as a unique 4-week online programme that captures many of the key elements of the usual PROMYS Europe experience. PROMYS Europe is a challenging mathematics summer programme based at the University of Oxford, UK.

PROMYS Europe Connect is seeking

• Pre-university students from across Europe (including all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean) who show unusual readiness to think deeply about mathematics;
• Undergraduate students who would like to work with them as counsellors. 

PROMYS Europe Connect is designed to encourage mathematically ambitious students who are at least 16 to explore the creative world of mathematics. Participants will tackle fundamental mathematical questions within a richly stimulating and supportive online community of fellow first-year students, returning students, undergraduate counsellors, research mentors, faculty, and visiting mathematicians.

First-year students will focus primarily on a series of very challenging problem sets, daily lectures, and exploration projects in Number Theory.  There will also be a programme of talks, by guest mathematicians and the counsellors, on a wide range of mathematical subjects, as well as courses aimed primarily at students who are returning to PROMYS Europe for a second or third time.

PROMYS Europe is a partnership of Wadham College and the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, the Clay Mathematics Institute, and PROMYS (Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists, founded in Boston in 1989).

The programme is dedicated to the principle that no one should be unable to attend for financial reasons.  Most of the cost is covered by the partnership and by generous donations from supporters. In addition, full and partial financial aid is available for those who need it.

Applications for counsellors and students are available on the PROMYS Europe website.  The closing date for counsellor applications is 7 February.  The closing date for first-year student applications is 14 March, and students will need to allow enough time before the deadline to tackle the application problems.  PROMYS Europe Connect will run online from 12 July to 6 August.

Happy New Year! 2021 has a lot to make up for after 2020, so we're starting with a bang with the launch of the Oxford Online Maths Club, a new weekly maths livestream from Oxford Mathematics.

The Club provides free super-curricular maths for ages 16-18. It is aimed at people about to start a maths degree at university or about to apply for one. We'll be livestreaming one hour of maths problems, puzzles, mini-lectures, and Q&A, and we'll be exploring links between A level maths and university maths with help from our Admissions Coordinator James Munro and our current Oxford Mathematics students. And you get to ask questions and share thoughts and feelings with like-minded mathematicians. 

In a nutshell, it’s free, interactive, casual, and relaxed, with an emphasis on problem-solving techniques, building fluency, and looking ahead at links to university maths. The Club follows in the footsteps of James's hugely popular weekly MAT (Mathematics Admissions Test) sessions where he went thorough entrance problems and took live questions.

Whether you're the only person you know interested in maths, or you're an entire sixth-form maths club looking for more content, we're here for you in 2021! Join us every Thursday 16:30 starting this Thursday, 7 January. 

We are very sad to hear the news of the death of Peter Neumann earlier today. Peter was the son of the mathematicians Bernhard Neumann and Hanna Neumann and, after gaining a B.A. from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1963, obtained his D.Phil from Oxford University in 1966.

Peter was a Tutorial Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford and a lecturer in the Mathematical Institute in Oxford, retiring in 2008. His work was in the field of group theory. He is also known for solving Alhazen's problem in 1997. In 2011 he published a book on the short-lived French mathematician Évariste Galois.

In 1987 Peter won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for his review of Harold Edwards' book Galois Theory. In 2003, the London Mathematical Society awarded him the Senior Whitehead Prize. He was the first Chairman of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust, from October 1996 to April 2004 and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours. Peter was President of the Mathematical Association from 2015-2016.

The Oxford Mathematics e-newsletter for December is out. Produced each quarter, it's a sort of 'Now That's What I Call Maths,' pulling together our greatest hits of the last few months in one place.

It's for anyone who wants a flavour of what we do - research, online teaching, public lectures, having a laugh.

And it's COVID-lite. Click here.

Over the past few weeks we have made 7 undergraduate lectures publicly available, sampling a range of topics from Geometry to Differential Equations. Today & over the next 2 weeks for the first time we're showing a full course on our YouTube Channel. Ben Green's 2nd Year 'Metric Spaces' (the first half of the Metric Spaces and Complex Analysis course)' gets to grips with the concept of distance. 

We are making these lectures available to give an insight in to life in Oxford Mathematics. All lectures are followed by tutorials where students meet their tutor in pairs to go through the lecture and associated worksheet. Course materials can be found here

This Tuesday, 8th December, from 8am GMT onwards (repeated) you can watch 2020 Physics Laureate and Oxford Mathematician Roger Penrose's specially recorded Nobel Lecture in which he talks about the background to and genesis of his work on Black Holes which won him the prize; and also where our understanding of Black Holes is taking us. 

On the same day Roger will be presented with the Nobel diploma and medal at the Swedish Ambassador’s Residence in London and you can watch this as part of the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony from 3.30pm GMT on Thursday 10 December. Watch both here. 

As Roger said on receiving the news of the award: "In 1964 the existence of Black Holes was not properly appreciated. Since then they have become of increased importance in our understanding of the Universe and I believe this could increase in unexpected ways in the future."

Roger Penrose is one of our greatest living scientists. His work on Black Holes provided the mathematical tools needed by experimentalists to go and find Black Holes. His fellow prize winners, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel went and did just that.

However, Roger's work has ranged much further than just the Universe, from twistor theory to quasi-periodic tiling, spin networks to impossible triangles, a range that perhaps might not be so encouraged in academia today.

Now in his 90th year Roger is still researching and writing. He will give an Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture in January 2021 to celebrate the Nobel Prize.

Photography below and above by Professor Alain Goriely.  Updated photographs further below of Roger receiving the Nobel Medal and Diploma from the Swedish Ambassador in London on 8 December.

The latest in our Autumn 2020 series of lectures is the first lecture in Alan Lauder's Second Year Linear Algebra Course. In this lecture Alan (with help from Cosi) explains to students how the course will unfold before going on to talk specifically about Vector Spaces and Linear Maps.

All lectures are followed by tutorials where students meet their tutor in pairs to go through the lecture and associated worksheet. The course materials and worksheets can be found here.

That's Cosi on the left.

The second in the series of Student Lectures that we are making publicly available this Autumn is from Vicky Neale. Vicky is one of our most popular lecturers and this lecture is from her First Year Analysis course. 

The course introduces students to a rigorous definition of convergence, allowing them to develop their previous understanding of sequences and series and to prove key results about convergence, leading on to subsequent Analysis courses addressing continuity, differentiability and integrability of functions.

All lectures are followed by tutorials where students meet their tutor in pairs to go through the lecture and associated worksheet.

Oxford Mathematics Online Public Lecture: Anna Seigal - Ideas for a Complex World

Thursday 19 November, 5-6pm. No need to register, watching details below (and the talk will stay up afterwards).

Humans have been processing information in the world for a long time, finding patterns and learning from our surroundings to solve problems. Today, scientists make sense of complex problems by gathering vast amounts of data, and analysing them with quantitative methods. These methods are important tools to understand the issues facing us: the spread of disease, climate change, or even political movements. But this quantitative toolbox can seem far removed from our individual approaches for processing information in our day-to-day lives. This disconnect and inaccessibility leads to the scientific tools becoming entangled in politics and questions of trust.

In this talk, Anna will describe how some of the ideas at the heart of science’s quantitative tools are familiar to us all. We’ll see how mathematics enables us to turn the ideas into tools. As a society, if we can better connect with the ideas driving this toolbox, we can see when to use (and not to use) the available tools, what’s missing from the toolbox, and how we might come up with new ideas to drive our future understanding of the world around us.

Anna Seigal is a Hooke Research Fellow in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at The Queen's College.

Watch live (no need to register):
Oxford Mathematics Twitter
Oxford Mathematics Facebook
Oxford Mathematics Livestream
Oxford Mathematics YouTube

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.