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The Hedgehog Fund Awards

Small colourful hedgehogs are awaiting students to make a meaningful contribution during their studies. The hedgehogs are sourced from a local book shop (and proceedings from their sale help support real hedgehogs in the wild). The Hedgehog Fund was established in 2010 (and is a pun on the Hedge Funds that were all the talk after 2008 financial crash).

hedgehogs  to be awarded

Awardees on the Science of Music module 2019/20:

Melanie Chen for creating her intro music clip using AI and sharing the AI - generated music project with the class

Ben Rawlinson for finding and explaining an error in a quiz question which lay unnoticed by anyone since 2016

James Haig and Rosie Maclver-Redwood for co-delivering lecture on Voice, singing performances and presenting their own research on vowels and voice.

Daniel Luce for finding an error in a new quiz question and re-writing it for future cohorts to improve understanding and help with revision

Why Hedgehogs?

Hedgehogs are featured prominently in a broad range of scientific literature. Here are some highlights. For a fuller Maths and Physics related list please see the hedgehog fund

A. Denise et al,

The Elegance of Sonic Hedgehog: Emerging Novel Functions for a Classic Morphogen,

Journal of Neuroscience, 2018, 38 (44) 9338-9345

A toy hedgehog

P. Cladis,
Liquid Crystals and the Drunken Hedgehog,
Physics World, 5 (1992) 22.

Apparently, the LC monitors you probably use every day can be a home to a whole universe of hedgehogs: Hedgehogs Radial and Hyperbolic, and less orderly Metastable and Drunken ones...

toy hedgehog peeping out of a cup

Guendelman, E. I., Rabinowitz, A. I.

Hedgehog compactification,
Phys. Rev. D (3) 47 (1993), 8, pp. 3474–3475

No hedgehogs were killed during this work

toy hedgehog is made compact (squashed) by a huge book on Graph Theory

Cladis, P. E.; Brand, Helmut R.


Hedgehog-antihedgehog pair annihilation to a static soliton,
 Phys. A 326 (2003), no. 3-4, 322–332

By far the most impressive title of a research paper we have found!

two toy hedgehogs in complimentary colours having a collision

K. Skipper

Hyperbolic hedgehog’ steers active droplets in a liquid crystal, Physics World, Nov 2020

It is a hedgehog-friendly article explaining a recent paper in
Nature Physics, 1465, 21 (2020)

Conclusion? Everything is better with hedgehogs!

toy hedgehog showing a wind up swimmer toy where to swim