Latest news

Ongoing Works

Piling Rigs:-The piling activities are now largely installed with drilling operations continuing for only one more week.

Secant Piles:- There is a total of 532 secant piles bored to a depth in excess of 20m to form a continuous concrete pile wall around the perimeter of the double storey basement. There are two types of secant pile: a female pile formed from a weaker concrete mix and a male pile that is reinforced with steel and provides the strength in the wall. Secant is a mathematical term and comes from the Latin secare (to cut). The male pile cuts into the female pile providing a continuous sealed basement wall.

Pile Cropping:- It is necessary to cut down the top of the piles to expose the reinforcement cage to tie into the capping beam and also remove any debris that sometimes contaminates the top of the pile when extracting the auger. This activity is carried out using a specialist cropping attachment for the excavator and trimmed using breakers. We are currently 50% through this activity and expect to complete towards the end of October.

Capping Beam:- A concrete capping beam is being constructed along the top of the piles to connect them and form a solid continuous ring beam. This operation has commenced near the Woodstock Road and will continue to the beginning of November.

Future works for October

Steel Propping:- Large steel props are expected to be secured into position on w/c 10-10-11 using a crane. These will brace at ground level along the capping beam in order to restrain the ground pressure from the surrounding sides of the building once digging commences.

The Big Dig:- Excavation of the soil within the footprint of the building is expected to start in mid October. There will be over 47,000m3 of soil to be removed. The gravel will be recycled and the clay used locally as fill material. As the excavation proceeds the props and capping beam will be closely monitored to ensure there is no movement.

Images from Site Tour on 14/10/2011

John Ball was elected to the Executive Board of the International Council for Science (ICSU) at its 30th General Assembly held in Rome 24 September - October 1, 2011.

As described on the IMU website,

"ICSU is the International Council of Science. Its members are scientific international unions and nations. Together with other partners including the United Nations and UNESCO, it plays a fundamental role in the research areas which require both massive collaboration and sharing of data, such as the global climate studies that supported the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which received the Nobel Prize in 2007. Such studies cannot take place without long term massive support allowing large scale collaboration of scientists across disciplines and countries, and archiving of data of previous studies, a support that cannot be provided locally at research institutions. The International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) is now an associate member of ICSU."

Xunyu Zhou, Nomura Professor of Mathematical Finance and Director of Nomura Centre for Mathematical Finance will give a plenary lecture during the 2012 Bachelier Congress in Sydney; http://www.bfs2012.com/

Mike Giles, Professor of Scientific Computing and a member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance will give a plenary lecture during MCQMC 2012, Tenth International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing, Sydney; http://www.mcqmc2012.unsw.edu.au/

Jan Obloj, University Research Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute and a member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance has been awarded the 2011 Bruti-Liberati Fellowship at University of Technology, Sydney and will deliver the Bruti-Liberati Plenary Lecture during the 2011 QMF Conference; http://www.qfrc.uts.edu.au/qmf/

Professor Jim Murray, former member of the Mathematical Institute and founder of the Centre for Mathematical Biology, will be presented with the 2011 Leonardo da Vinci Award of the European Academy of Sciences at a ceremony in Milan on 11th November.

See http://www.eurasc.org/docs/2011/Milano_invitation.pdf (Jim's citation is on page 5) for further details.

A ground breaking ceremony was held at noon on 2nd August 2011 to mark the official beginning of the construction phase for the new maths building.

See the new building section of the website for more information on the project including pictures showing how the building will look and time lapse movies showing recent activity on site.

Kostas Zygalakis (OCCAM) and Richard Norton (OxMoS) were awarded second prizes in the 2011 Leslie Fox Prize competition in Numerical Analysis. For details of the prize, and of the prize-winners' talks, see http://www.mims.manchester.ac.uk/events/workshops/FOX2011/ . Kostas works on numerical methods for stochastic differential equations, and Richard works on convergence analysis of planewave expansion methods for Schroedinger operators with discontinuous periodic potentials.

This coming Wednesday (27th July, 21:00) sees the return of Marcus Du Sautoy to our TV screens in his new BBC programme, The Code. The Code is a three-part TV series about maths in the world around us. The Code is also a treasure hunt!

Further details can be found at the programme website

Due to a power failure in the Dartington House server room we have experienced an outage of half of our services from ~2:45-3:15pm . Power has been restored fairly quickly and all services are back up. A full investigation into the causes will take place in the next few days.