Professor Karen Vogtmann has been awarded a prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellowship for 2014–15 to investigate “Outer spaces in geometric group theory”.

Groups are algebraic objects that encode symmetry, which explains why they are fundamental to all of mathematics and the physical sciences. Groups themselves have symmetries called automorphisms, and the simplest groups often have the most complex and interesting autoorphism groups. Professor Vogtmann works on developing geometric tools for studying such automorphism groups. This specific project concentrates on outer automorphism groups of free groups and more generally of right-angled Artin groups, a class of groups particularly relevant to recent breakthroughs in 3-manifold topology.

The awards, which are administered by the Royal Society, are jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS); the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract science talent from overseas and to retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

Royal Society press release