5 December 2010

Davoud Cheraghi wins Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship

Marie Curie Research Fellow Davoud Cheraghi has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Philip Leverhulme Prizes are awarded to outstanding scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, recognised at an international level, and where the expectation is that their greatest achievement is yet to come.

Early Career Fellowships aim to provide career development opportunities for those who are at a relatively early stage of their academic careers but with a proven record of research.

Davoud Cheraghi's work during his followship will include the study of time evolution which can often be described by assuming that the state x(n+1) at time n+1 is determined by the state x(n) at time n.

For the simplest setting x(n+1)=f(x(n)) where f, is a polynomial there is a huge theory (related to the Mandelbrot set and so on), For example, it is known that each polynomial can be approximated by one with predictable behaviour. Many fundamental questions remain unanswered though. We aim to show that randomly chosen polynomials have a behaviour which is predictable in the statistical sense, i.e. one can describe long range forecasts of random initial states.

Warwick University Press release

27 October 2010

Warwick Public Lectures in Mathematics and Statistics

Speaker: David J Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS (Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, University of Cambridge)

Living with risk and uncertainty — we're all going to die (sometime)

Past experience and probability theory can be used to check the odds of your football team winning or judge the risks of activities such as riding motorcycles, taking illegal drugs, going into hospital or just living. Things get more difficult when we don't fully understand what is going on, like early on in the swine-flu epidemic, or when we are dealing with huge complexity, as in climate change. Then it can be helpful to admit what we don't know, and I shall show how we can use probability and statistics to measure how ignorant you are.

Date: Monday 22nd November 2010

Time: 6.15pm

Venue: MS.01, Zeeman Building (Mathematics and Statistics, University of Warwick)

Drinks, Free Car Parking

27 October 2010

WMI in the Excellence group of the CHE Excellence Rankings 2010

In the latest Europe-wide CHE Excellence Rankings 2010, the Masters and PhD programmes of the Warwick Mathematics Department have been ranked in the "Excellence Group". The CHE press release makes a special mention that the Mathematics Department is especially strong in research and internationally oriented in comparison to the rest of Europe.

130 universities in Europe offer outstanding, research-strong departments with an international orientation for master's and doctoral students in the subjects of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics; for this accomplishment, they belong to the "Excellence Group" of the CHE Excellence Ranking 2010.

29 June 2010

Charlie Elliott receives the Humboldt-Forschungspreis

On Tuesday 22nd June at a ceremony in the Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, Professor Charlie Elliott was a recipient of the Humboldt-Forschungspreis (Humboldt Research Award) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany

The award is granted in recognition of a researcher's lifetime achievements to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future. Elliott was cited for his outstanding contributions to the analysis and numerical analysis of nonlinear partial differential equations, proving first existence and uniqueness results, developing and analysing new numerical schemes and applying his theoretical results to practically relevant problems from material science, fluid dynamics, theoretical biology and others. Award winners are invited to cooperate on research projects of their own choice with colleagues at a research institution in Germany. Elliott plans to visit Prof H. Garcke (Regensburg), Prof. K-H Hoffmann (TUMunich) and Prof R. Kornhuber (Free University Berlin).

Links:

26 May 2010

Five years of Warwick in Africa

In July 2006 a pioneer group of twelve second year Mathematics students went to South Africa to teach in township schools around Johannesburg. This was a great success and has become an annual event, as well as expanding to more countries and other subject areas.

The University is now celebrating the fifth year of this programme in which Warwick student volunteers, many of them Mathematics students, work with schools in Africa. Warwick students and alumni, representatives from the University of the Witwatersrand and friends and funders of the project attended an event at the University on 22 May to mark the occasion and to launch a short film about the project. The film includes an introduction from Warwick Honorary Graduate Lenny Henry. The volunteers were also delighted to hear the news that the programme was now endorsed by the “Clinton Global Initiative University”

14 April 2010

73rd European Study Group with Industry held at Warwick

Ever since its inception the Warwick Mathematics Institute has not only espoused the highest quality theoretical research but has shown unusual and sometimes inspired interest in its relevance in practical applications.

The Institute’s enthusiasm has reached new heights by co-organising, together with the KTN (see below), the 73rd European Study Group with Industry during the week 12th to 16th April 2010. These Study Groups are an internationally recognised highlight of UK Applied Mathematics. They have been held annually in the UK for over 40 years, and provide a forum for industrialists to work, week-long, alongside established academic mathematicians, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students on problems of direct industrial importance and forging links that have led to many long-term collaborations.

Problems being considered at Warwick this week include modelling photolysis in the surface of soil, risk assessment for hurricanes and earthquakes, structural dynamics of wind turbines, tracking and categorising moving objects from emitted signals, improving broadband performance along BT lines and perfecting the design of reclining chairs.

The success of the Study Groups’ unique format, using problems presented by industry as the driver for intensive collaborative mathematical research, is shown by the extent to which it has been copied around the world. Study Groups are now also held annually in the USA, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, China, South Africa, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Germany and Australia. Since 1990 the UK events have become the central component of a wider European series and later this year, there will be new Study Groups started in Turkey, Russia and Poland with the next UK event to be held in Wales over Easter 2011.

Study Groups are but one component of the burgeoning national and international maths-in-industry scene – for further information please go to:

11 February 2010

Maths students in winning team at IBM Hursley Innovation Day

The University of Warwick Computer Society organised a visit on January 27th to an Innovation Day at IBM Hursley. In the afternoon the attendees participated in an innovation workshop where they divided into groups and were asked to identify an aspect of their University that could become much smarter with the help of technology. With just five minutes to pitch their ideas and answer challenging questions from the judges, teams had to focus on originality, value and presentation.

The winning team comprised Matt Marshall (Maths), Zhong Chan (Maths), Alex Oakes (Maths), Chris Pitt (Computer Science), Ben Falconer (Engineering), and scooped prizes of an iPod shuffle each for their idea of a campus nightclub intelligently connected to the musical tastes of attendees, an idea which greatly impressed the judges.

Yvonne Billingsley, from IBM's UK University Relations team, explains: “The key element of the day is interactivity – we introduce students to IBM's innovations and innovators, and then challenge them to become innovators too, exploring creative ways of thinking and applying smart technology to real world problems.”

8 February 2010

Dwight Barkley awarded a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship

Dwight Barkley has been awarded a prestigious Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship for the academic year 2009/10. Only 7 of these fellowships are given each year across all science areas.

From the research proposal: “When fluid flows through a channel, pipe, or duct, there are two basic forms of fluid motion: smooth laminar motion and complex turbulent motion. The discontinuous transition between these states of motion is a long-standing open problem of great practical importance. What has come to light only recently is that there is a universal self-organization of turbulent and laminar fluid on a vast length scale near the critical Reynolds number where turbulence first appears. This work aims to develop a theory for this phenomenon and to explain its role in the transition to turbulence.”

The Fellowships are administered by the Royal Society.