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Mathematics Institute

Home page of Mark Pollicott

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In Kenilworth in 2023

Mark Pollicott

BSc (Maths&Phys) Warwick 1981
PhD (Mathematics) Warwick 1984

Mathematics Institute,
University of Warwick,
Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

Office: B.2.27 (Zeeman Building)
Tel: 44 (0)24 7657 4830
Email: masdbl@warwick.ac.uk

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As a student in 1982
Links: CV (Dec.2022) Publications Preprints Google Scholar What's in a name?

LMS talk (27 March 2023)

Research Interests

My main research area is Thermodynamic Formalism, which is a subset of Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems. I am particularly interested in applications to other areas of mathematics, including geometry, number theory, fractal geometry and analysis. A brief description is here.

 spiral  apollonian 
 		  model 
The dimension of the cantor set of numbers whose continued fraction contains only digits 1 and 2.

A circle packing: The diameters of the circles have a simple asymptotic formula

 A simple "Blue Peter" model of a chaotic flow corresponding to a geodesic flow

A Little Background

I was born in Nottingham, England and attended High Pavement Grammer School, where my housemaster was booker prize winning author Stanley Middleton. I was both an undergraduate (in the Physics Department) and a graduate student (in the Mathematics Department ) at Warwick University. My PhD supervisor was the late William Parry, FRS. I returned to Warwick for the first time from 1992 to 1995 (as a Lecturer, then Reader) and for the second time in 2005 (as a Professor).

When not at Warwick, I held permanent positions in Edinburgh (New Blood Lecturer, 1984-88), Porto (Investigador Auxiliar, 1989-92) and Manchester (Fielden chair, 1996-2004).

I have also been the recipient of a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (1992-97), two Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowships (1998-99 and 2007-2008), a E.U. Marie Curie Chair (2004-05) and an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship (2015-2019). I currently hold an ERC Advanced Grant (2019-2024).

In addition, I have held visiting positions at IHES (Paris, 1984-85 and 2012-13), IAS (Princeton, 1988-89), MSRI (Berkeley, 1989 and 2015), CalTech (Pasadena, 1990) and Grenoble (1990). From Jul-Dec.2019 I held the Jean Morlet chair at CIRM (Luminy-Marsailles).

Scientific Activities

I have co-organized a 6 month programme on Ergodic Theory, Geometric Rigidity and Number Theory at the Newton Institute (2000); a year long symposium on Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems (2010-2011); a 6 month programme on Fluctuations and Large Deviations at the CIB-Lausanne (2013); and a 4 month programme on Dimension and Dynamics at ICERM-Providence (2016), as well many other individual conferences.including a school, workshop and conference on Thermodynamic Formalism (CIRM-Luminy, 1-12 July and 9-13 December, 2019).

I am a consulting editor for the Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, an editor for the Journal of Fractal Geometry and Nonlinearity, a member of the Advisory Board for the Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics and a former editor of both Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems and Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems.

Tours of Mathematics

During October 2020-February 2021 and October 2021 I gave a series of talks entitled a ``Tour of Mathematics'' to third year undergraduates describing my research interests. Here are my handwritten notes: Tour 1, Tour 2, Tour 3 ,Tour 4 , Tour 5, Tour 6, Tour 7.