Papers Notes Reviews Teaching: Undergraduate Graduate PhD Students Cambridge Discrete Analysis Seminar

Work

I am the Herchel Smith Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College.

I did my PhD under the supervision of Tim Gowers, whose webpage is well worth a visit. My thesis, which I finally completed in 2003, is lengthy and little more than a union of some of my papers, so I won't make it available online. I did my undergraduate degree and PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, and I was also a research Fellow there between 2001 and 2005. I held a chair at Bristol University from January 2005 until my return to Cambridge in September 2006, and I've also held visiting positions of various types at Princeton, the Rényi Institute in Budapest, PIMS at UBC in Vancouver and MIT. For the academic year 2009-10 I was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard.

Research Interests

Much of my work has been in the area now known as Additive Combinatorics. The area is a little hard to define, but some idea of its scope can be gleaned from the recent book by Terence Tao and Van Vu of the same name. Problems in the area may have the flavour of number theory, analysis or combinatorics, or combinations of all three. Indeed one of the attractions of the area, in my mind, is the diversity of the techniques one finds oneself needing to acquire. I take an interest in many other areas - ergodic theory and geometric group theory, for example, or any kind of number theory with a slightly analytic bent. I share quite a few of the tastes of my collaborator Terence Tao, whose blog is a fantastic source of information on all kinds of mathematics. A CV, Publication List and lists of talks past and future are available.

Miscellany

The British Mathematical Olympiad.
It transpired that one of the greatest scientists of all time grew up about 100 metres from where I did, and went to the same school. And just for good measure, the title of most handsome alumnus of that school (as well as my secondary school) is also in no doubt.
Here is short article entitled "Ramsey Theory at the IMO", which appeared in a special IMO 2002 edition of the Mathematical Gazette.
"So I decided to explore randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep."