Professor Mark Pollicott from the Department of Mathematics has been awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant of €1.9m for a research project to develop new methods and theories in pure maths. This will have important and diverse applications to many different areas.

So what does the project involve? Professor Pollicott explains: “Many physical systems evolve in a way which can be mathematically modelled. For particularly complicated or chaotic" systems, it is impossible to predict this behaviour precisely, although in the long term it settles down to a stable equilibrium which can be better understood. The ERC grant will enable us to study "resonances" - these are simple characteristic values (complex numbers) which describe the speed at which the equilibrium is approached.”

The project can be segmented into three broad areas. The first part will involve developing numerical algorithms to carry out experiments. The second part will be based on developing new methods to understand how exactly these resonances work in a number of important test cases. The last part is to apply the theory more widely to open problems in different area of pure maths - particularly number theory and geometry.

This research is aligned with the Mathematics and its Real World Applications theme in our Research Strategy.