Research
Although only founded in 1965, Warwick is now one of the largest mathematics departments in England (together with Oxford and Cambridge), and is a world centre of mathematics research. We have about 100 graduate students, and around 15-20 Ph.D.s graduate each year. Many Warwick graduates are mathematics lecturers or professors at top universities in Britain, the United States and other countries.
You may not feel that you, as an undergraduate, are in direct contact with research mathematics, but the research strength of the Warwick Department provides many important benefits. Your graduate supervisor, and most of your lecturers, were attracted and kept here by the research quality and the unique atmosphere. Your lecturers are playing a leading role in many areas of mathematics, and are in contact with many of the world's top mathematicians. Lecturers involved in research are interested in their subject, and enthusiastic in lectures; there's nothing worse than a lecturer bored with his subject!
The Warwick Mathematics Institute is involved in running a number of Centres:
Mathematical Interdisciplinary Research at Warwick (MIR@W, Director: Robert MacKay) The guiding principle behind MIR@W is a view of the relation between maths and other sciences that is broader than traditional applied mathematics, and accommodates new and rapidly growing areas such as mathematical biology, computer science and information technology, economics, finance and the environmental sciences. Eleven Warwick departments currently belong to MIR@W: Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, Maths Education, Statistics, Warwick Business School. MIR@W activities include an M.Sc./Ph.D. programme, an active series of workshops on focussed topics, and interdepartmental research seminars and projects.
Mathematics Research Centre (MRC, Director: Keith Ball) The MRC was Christopher Zeeman's brainchild, and has been the life and soul of maths at Warwick for the last 45 years. It runs a symposium and several short workshops each year. A Warwick symposium is a year-long conference on a chosen field of mathematics, supported by a main grant from the British EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), and attracting mathematics visitors from all over the world. The curiously shaped (but very comfortable) houses behind the Gibbet Hill cafeteria were built with a grant from the Nuffield Foundation in the late 1960s to house some of these visitors.
Warwick Symposia have taken place most years since 1965 in almost every field of mathematics research. The themes over the last ten years have been
2008-09 Challenges in Scientific Computing
2009-10 Complexity and systems biology
2010-11 Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems
2011-12 Probability
2012-13 Number Theory
2013-14 Statistical Mechanics / Mathematics of Phase Transitions
2014-15 Derived Categories and Applications
2015-16 Fluctuation-driven phenomena and large deviations
2016-17 Partial Differential Equations and their Applications
2017-18 Geometry, Topology and Dynamics in Low Dimensions
Complexity Science (Co-Director: Colm Connaughton) The University of Warwick leads the UK with a ground-breaking "Complexity Complex'' to connect and develop interdisciplinary research in complexity science at all levels, train a new generation of complexity scientists via a doctoral training centre, understand, control and design complex systems, produce break-throughs in the principles and applications of complexity science, link with end-users as sources of real-world problems and beneficiaries from the resulting knowledge and trainees, and sustain a lively intellectual and practically based environment for complexity science.
Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP, Director: Artur Czumaj, Computer Science) DIMAP is a collaboration between Department of Computer Science, the Warwick Mathematics Institute, and the Operational Research and Management Sciences group in the Warwick Business School. The goal of the DIMAP Centre is to establish a strong multidisciplinary research centre supporting an internationally competitive programme of research in discrete modelling, algorithmic analysis, and combinatorial (discrete) optimization. It aims to support a thriving Industrial Affiliates Programme, and develop collaborative research rooted in discrete mathematics, involving researchers at other UK universities.
Systems Biology and Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research (Director: Matt Keeling) Systems biology involves developing the understanding of a biological system through the mathematical and computational modelling of the interactions of components of the system, leading to the expression of this understanding in qualitative and quantitative terms. Epidemiology research attempts to model the spread of various diseases through mathematical modelling, to understand how diseases spread and how this spread can be curtailed or how they may be prevented. This research centre is joint with the School of Life Sciences.