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Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics

 

2018-2020

With sadness the Department must announce  the death of Jan Saxl, (5 June 1948-2 May 2020) Professor of Algebra and Fellow of Caius College. The Guardian Obituary  Gonville & Caius College Obituary. 

With sadness the Department must announce the death of John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 - 11 April 2020)  a former member of the Department and fellow of Gonville & Cauis College.  A mathematician active in the theory of finite groupsknot theorynumber theorycombinatorial game theory and coding theory The Guardian Obituary

Congratulations to David Spiegelhalter awarded  The Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture 2020 for bringing key insights from the disciplines of statistics and probability vividly home to the public at large, and to key decision-makers, in entertaining and accessible ways, most recently through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Congratulations to Holly Kreiger and Henry Wilton on winning LMS Whitehead prizes

Senior Academic Promotions: Congratulations to Peter Varju and Oscar Randal-Williams on their promotion to the rank of Professor and to Roland Bauerschmidt on his promotion to Reader

Conference: Non linear waves in Cambridge 2020 Cancelled

Workshop in honour of James Norris' 60th birthday - postponed

OxPDE 2020 Conference, 19-20 March 2020 postponed

Holly Krieger 2019 Mahler Lecturer

Julia Wolf LMS-NZMS Forder Lecturer  2020

Congratulations to Tom Hutchcroft on being jointly awarded the 2019 Rollo Davidson Prize

Congratulations to Ewain Gwynne on being awarded a 2019 Clay Research Fellowship

Congratulations to Oscar Randal-Williams on being awarded the "Dannie Heineman prize" by the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.

Congratulations to Henry Wilton  on being jointly awarded Canadian Mathematical Society's 2019 G. de B Robinson Award

Congratulations to Maurice Chiodo on winning a Student-Led Teaching Award Student-Led Award for Innovative teaching.

Senior Promotions: Congratulations to Jason Miller on his promotion to a Professorship and to Rajen Shah, Perla Sousi and Peter Varju on their promotions to Readerships.

Congratulations to Caucher Birkar awarded Royal Society Professorship.

Congratulations to Caucher Birkar . The Royal Society has announced its 2019 list of new fellows. In joint work with Paolo Cascini, Christopher Hacon, and James McKernan, Birkar proved the existence of minimal models for varieties of general type and the finite generation of canonical rings. These results have had a major impact on research in algebraic geometry.

In work on Fano varieties Birkar proved the Borisov-Alexeev-Borisov conjecture. This work also has deep applications to complements theory and linear systems, singularity theory, structure of birational automorphism groups, etc, and is expected to find further important applications especially to the minimal model program

Professor Ray Lickorish, one of the 2019 Class of Fellows announced by the AMS

Congratulations to Jack Thorne and Yifeng Liu (Yale) jointly awarded the 2018 SASTRA Prize .

Congratulations  to Caucher Birkar awarded Fields Medal for his proof of the boundedness of Fano varieties and for contributions to the minimal model program.

Congratulations to Richard Samworth awarded COPSS Presidents' Award 2018

Congratulations to Caucher Birkar and Peter Varju awarded Whitehead Prize
Congratulations to Caucher Birkar. Prize awarded in recognition of his outstanding research in higher dimensional algebraic geometry, most prominently his recent groundbreaking finiteness results on Fano varieties and Mori fibre spaces. Congratulations also to Peter Varju. Prize awarded in recognition for his deep and groundbreaking contributions to analysis and probability on algebraic structures.

Senior Promotions
Congratulations to Jake Rasmussen and Jack Thorne on their promotion to the rank of Professor

Dawid elected FRS
Congratulations to Philip Dawid. The Royal Society has announced its 2018 list of new fellows. Philip Dawid, has made fundamental contributions to both the philosophical underpinnings and the practical applications of Statistics. His theory of conditional independence is a keystone of modern statistical theory and methods, and he has has demonstrated its usefulness in a host of applications, including computation in probabilistic expert systems, causal inference, and forensic identification. His co-authored book Probabilistic Networks and Expert Systems won the first DeGroot Prize for a published book in Statistical Science, and he was awarded the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Silver in 2001.

Birkar wins William Hopkins Prize of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
Congratulations to Caucher Birkar awarded the William Hopkins Prize of the Cambridge Philosophical Society given for research and spectacular results over the last three years, and in particular for work on the proof of the Borisov-Alexeev-Borisov (BAB) conjecture on the boundedness of Fano varieties.

Randal-Williams wins Leverhulme Prize
Congratulations to Oscar Randal-Williams, who has been awarded a Leverhulme Prize for his work in algebraic topology and in particular the study of moduli spaces of manifolds. The prize recognizes the achievements of early career researchers across a broad range of fields.

ICM Rio 2018
Congratulations to Caucher Birkar, Jason Miller, Clement Mouhot, Ivan Smith and Jack Thorne; invited speakers at the ICM Rio 2018

Senior Academic Promotions
Congratulations to Oscar Randal-Williams and Henry Wilton on their promotion to Readership

2016-2017

Mark Gross
Congratulations to Mark Gross on being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

Martin Hyland
Congratulations to Martin Hyland on being awarded the Alonzo Church Award 2017

Jason Miller
Congratulations to Jason Miller on being awarded a 2017 Clay Research Award

Richard Samworth
Congratulations to Richard Samworth on being awarded the Adams Prize 2017

Rajen Shah
Congratulations to Rajen Shah on being awarded the Royal Statistical Society research prize for 2017

Richard Nickl
Congratulations to Richard Nickl on being awarded the 2017 Prose Award in Mathematics

Launch of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication

Richard Samworth
Congratulations to Richard Samworth on being chosen to present an IMS Medallion Lecture

Tim Gowers
Congratulations to Tim Gowers on being awarded the Royal Society's Sylvester Medal

Peter Varju
Congratulations to Peter Varju on the award of an EMS Prize

Jason Miller
Congratulations to Jason Miller on being awarded a Whitehead Prize.

Tim Gowers
Congratulations to Tim Gowers on being awarded a De Morgan Medal.

Senior Academic Promotions
Congratulations to Richard Nickl on his promotion to the rank of Professor, to Tom Fisher on his promotion to Reader and Mike Tehranchi on his promotion to Senior Lecturer.

Mark Gross
Congratulations to Mark Gross awarded the Clay Research Award.

2015-2016

Peter Whittle, Emeritus Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research, has been elected a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Engineering forcontributions to the mathematics of operations research and statistics.

£10 million for new maths centres to tackle life-threatening diseases
Life Sciences Minister George Freeman today (16 December) announced £10 million investment in five new research centres around the UK (including Cambridge) that will explore how mathematics and statistics can help clinicians to tackle serious health challenges such as cancer, heart disease and antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Caucher Birkar to receive the 2016 AMS Moore Prize
Caucher Birkar, Paolo Cascini, Christopher D. Hacon, and James McKernan received the 2016 AMS E. H. Moore Research Article Prize. They were honored for their article "Existence of minimal models for varieties of log general type," Journal of the AMS (2010).

Frank Kelly
Congratulations to Frank Kelly awarded the David Crighton Medal of the London Mathematical Society and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

Senior Academic Promotions
Congratulations to Nathanael Berestycki and Caucher Birkar on their promotion to the rank of Professor.

John Aston and Richard Samworth have been elected as Fellows of the American Statistical Association. There will be an awards ceremony at the Joint Statistical Meeting of the ASA in Seattle in the Summer.

Kelly awarded Alexander Graham Bell medal
The IEEE has awarded Professor Frank Kelly its Alexander Graham Bell Medal in recognition of his outstanding contributions to telecommunications. Kelly was cited for his work in "creating principled mathematical foundations for the design and analysis of congestion control, routing, and blocking in modern communication networks." Congratulations Frank!

2013-2014

Samworth wins Leverhulme Prize
Congratulations to Professor Richard Samworth, who has been awarded a Leverhulme Prize for his work in nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics. The prize recognizes the achievements of early career researchers across a broad range of fields.

French Academy of Science Prize for Mouhot
Congratulations to Professor Clément Mouhot, who has been awarded the 2014 Prix de Madame Victor Noury . This prestigous award is given yearly to a French scientist under the age of 45, and is a Grand Prize of the French Academy of Science.

DPMMS Welcomes New Members
The department is pleased to welcome three new permanent members: Jonathan Luk, Jack Thorne, and Henry Wilton. Dr. Luk works in the field of partial differential equations, and in particular the equations of general relativity. Dr. Thorne is an algebraic number theorist much of whose work is related to the local Langlands conjecture. Dr. Wilton works in the field of geometric group theory and 3-manifold groups.

We are also very glad to welcome a bumper crop of new postdocs, including Constante Belletini and Jan Sbierski (Analysis), Rory Lucyshyn-Wright (Category Theory), Stergios Antonadoukis, Georgios Dimitroglou-Rizell, Tyler Kelly, Cristiano Spotti, and Renato Vianna (all in Geometry), and Benoit Laslier, Ah Yeon Park, Gourab Ray, Shahin Tavakoli and Jean-Marc Freyermuth (in the Statslab).

Mouhot wins Whitehead Prize
Professor Clément Mouhot has been awarded a Whitehead Prize by the LMS for his "fundamental mathematical contributions to the foundations of statistical mechanics and the Boltzmann equation." Congratulations Clement!

Samworth Elected IMS Fellow
Congratulations to Professor Richard Samworth, who has been elected a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Samworth was cited for his "fundamental research in nonparametric classification, nonparametric inference under shape constraints and high dimensional variable selection."

Spiegelhalter Knighted
Congratulations to Sir David Spiegelhalter, who was knighted for his services to medical statistics. Spiegelhalter is the Winston Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory. He is widely known for his work in Bayesian analysis and its application to medicine and public health; for his service to the NHS in the Bristol Royal Infirmary and Shipman inquiries; and for his numerous public presentations on risk and statistics, which have appeared on television, radio, and in print.

Senior academic promotions
Congratulations to Neshan Wickramasekera on his promotion to the rank of Professor. Professor Wickramasekera works in the fields of geometric measure theory and differential geometry.

Grimmett and Markovic elected to Royal Society
Congratulations to Professors Geoffrey Grimmett and Vlad Markovic, who have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Grimmett was cited for his broad contributions to probability theory, and especially for his achievements in the rigorous theory of disordered systems. Markovic is known for his work on quasiconformal maps and their applications to low dimensional geometry and topology. Together with Jeremy Kahn he resolved the Surface Subgroup and Ehrenpreis Conjectures.

Cambridge to host BMC/BAMC in 2015
Next year's joint meeting of the British Mathematics Colloquium and British Applied Mathematics Colloquium will run from March 30 to April 2, 2015, and is being organized by the Faculty of Mathematics. Plenary speakers in pure mathematics will include Wendelin Werner and Andrew Wiles. Further details and a timeline are available here.

New Faculty in DPMMS
The department is pleased to welcome Professors John Aston and Mark Gross. Professor Aston's research interests are in applied statistics. He is known for his work modelling and analysing neuroimaging and linguistic data, as well as methodological contributions in functional data analysis and time series. Professor Gross works in the areas of algebraic and symplectic geometry. He is known for his work with Bernd Seibert on mirror symmetry and the SYZ conjecture.

Laure Dumaz wins Chancellerie Prize
Laure Dumaz has been awarded the Prix de la Chancellerie of the universities of Paris. This recognises the best PhD thesis in all fields of mathematics over the greater Paris area. Her thesis work, in probability theory, was on fine properties of self-repelling random motion and random matrices. Currently she is a research associate in Cambridge, working in the programme "New Frontiers in Random Geometry."

Frank Kelly wins INFORMS Expository Writing Award
Frank Kelly, professor of the mathematics of systems, has received the 2013 Saul Glass Expository Writing Award, honouring an operations researcher/management scientist whose publications demonstrate a consistently high standard of expository writing. The citation distinguishes his book Reversibility and Stochastic Networks, and the 1998 paper "Rate Control for Communication Networks: Shadow Prices, Proportional Fairness and Stability" (co-authored with A.K. Maulloo and D.K.H. Tan) — and concludes, "[Professor Kelly's] work exemplifies the art of technical writing, and has been extremely influential in both theory and applications."

Senior academic promotions
Congratulations to Clement Mouhot and Richard Samworth, who have been promoted to the rank of Professor. Professor Mouhot's research interests include partial differential equations and kinetic theory, while Professor Samworth works in the fields of nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics.

Four Faculty Members to Speak at ICM
Congratulations to Professors Mihalis Dafermos, Geoffrey Grimmet, Mark Gross, and Vlad Markovic, who have been invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The ICM will be held September 2014 in Seoul, South Korea.

DPMMS Welcomes New Faculty Members
The department is pleased to welcome Professor Mark Gross, Professor Vladimir Markovic, and Dr. Oscar Randal-Williams.
Professor Gross works in the areas of algebraic and symplectic geometry. He is known for his work with Bernd Seibert on mirror symmetry and the SYZ conjecture. Professor Gross will be arriving in Cambridge in January 2014.
Professor Markovic, who will hold the Sadleirian Professorship, works in the fields of hyperbolic geometry and Teichmuller theory. He is known for his work with Jeremy Kahn, in which they resolved both the Ehrenpreis Conjecture and the Surface Subgroup Conjecture.
Dr. Randal-Williams, who was previously a Herchel Smith Fellow, works in the fields of algebraic and geometric topology. He is known for his work with Soren Galatius on the topology of high-dimensional manifolds.

2012-2013

Ivan Smith wins 2013 Adams prize
Ivan Smith, Professor of Geometry, has been awarded the 2013 Adams Prize, for `several beautiful and important results in symplectic topology'. The Adams prize is one of the oldest and most prestigious prizes of the University of Cambridge, awarded jointly each year by the Faculty of Mathematics and St John's College to a young (normally under 40 years of age), UK-based researcher doing first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences. More details here.

Frank Kelly receives New Year's honour
Frank Kelly, professor of the mathematics of systems, has been awarded a CBE in the New Year's honours list for services to mathematical sciences. Frank chairs the Council for the Mathematical Sciences, is the current master of Christ's College, and previously served as chief scientific adviser to the Department of Transport.

2011-2012

Tim Gowers knighted
As part of the Queen's birthday honours list 2012, it was announced that Tim Gowers had been knighted for "services to mathematics". Tim Gowers's research spans several areas of mathematics, including combinatorics and functional analysis, for which he received numerous honours including the Fields medal in 1998. He also maintains a highly popular blog, and has been a forceful advocate for Open Access in scientific publishing.

Senior promotions announced
It was announced that Nathanaël Berestycki and Richard Nickl have been promoted to Reader, and Ivan Smith to Professor. Nathanaël Berestycki's research interests are in probability theory and its connections to analysis and geometry. Richard Nickl works on statistical theory and functional analysis. Ivan Smith works at the interface between symplectic topology and algebraic geometry.

Richard Samworth awarded £1.2M EPSRC fellowship
The grant is to cover research on high-dimensional statistical interference, which has recently emerged as one of the fundamental challenges in modern mathematical statistics and applications. More details here.

Frank Kelly (DPMMS) and John Hinch (DAMTP) elected to the US National Academy of Engineering.
One of the highest distinctions in the field of engineering, this election honours the recipients' "contributions to the theory and optimization of communications networks" in the first case, and the "contributions to the mechanics of fluids, suspensions, and polymeric liquids and to industrial processes" in the second. More details here and here.

Richard Samworth receives the Guy medal in bronze from the Royal Statistical Society
The award is with respect to his work on theoretical, methodological, and computational aspects of non-parametric statistics. The award is one of the society's most prestigious honours and is typically given to individuals under 35. More details here.

Tim Gowers awarded the 2011 Stefan Banach medal
The medal, awarded by the Polish Academy of Sciences for outstanding achievements in mathematical sciences, was set up in 1992 to honour the centenary of the great Polish mathematician. More details here.

DPMMS welcomes new faculty members!
Prof. Danny Calegari's prolific work is at the interface between geometry, dynamics and topology.
Dr. A. Juhász, previously a Herchel Smith Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the department, has been awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. His research focuses on low-dimensional topology.
Dr. V. Kargin is a temporary lecturer in the Statistical Laboratory. His research interests are the field of random matrices, at the intersection between probability theory, analysis and theoretical physics.
Dr. J. Pridham is an EPSRC Career acceleration fellow, and works in algebraic geometry.
Dr. Bodhi Sen is a new lecturer in the Statistical Laboratory, his research is in nonparametric statistics and applications in astronomy and high-energy physics.
Prof. John Toland FRS has been appointed director of the Newton Institute and NM Rothschild and Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences.

A new year for Part III
In October 2011, 233 students arrived at Cambridge for Part III of the Mathematical Tripos. Part III is the world's most successful one-year master's program in the mathematical sciences. Students can choose from more than 75 advanced lecture courses across the whole range of pure and applied mathematics, statistics, and mathematical physics.
Of this year's Part III students, 88 have been undergraduate students at Cambridge, while 145 have come to Cambridge from all over the world for Part III. Cambridge students are awarded the Master of Mathematics (M Math) degree after their four-year degree, while students from outside Cambridge who do Part III receive the Master of Advanced Study (MASt). Many Part III students go on to the world's leading graduate schools, or directly into industry.

2010-2011

Béla Bollobás and Simon Tavaré elected FRS.
The Royal Society has announced its 2011 list of new fellows. Bollobás is a world leader in combinatorics, graph theory and percolation; Tavaré is a pioneer in the field of stochastic computations for cancer genomics. Other mathematicians named this year include Steffen Lauritzen and Werner Nahm, and Mikhail Gromov in the foreign category. See the list and announcement here.

Richard Samworth awarded Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2011-2012 .
These prestigious fellowships allow the holder to be relieved from teaching and administrative duties. Dr. Samworth's reasearch focuses on problems in high-dimensional and nonparametric statistics.

Cambridge probability awarded an EPSRC Programme grant.
The grant, of around £1.65M, will fund the programme New Frontiers in Random Geometry (RaG), beginning in 2011. The thrust of RaG is to explore geometrical aspects of random processes, with emphasis on processes of fragmentation, embedding, and aggregation. It will fund an extensive postdoctoral and visitor programme over the next six years. More info here.

Wendelin Werner named Visiting Professor.
Werner, who was a postdoc in DPMMS, earned a Fields medal in 2006 for groundbreaking work on conformal invariance in random planar processes. He will visit the department for periods over the next three years, starting in February 2011.

Tim Gowers wins Euler Book prize
In January 2011, Tim Gowers won the Euler Book Prize for The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (Princeton, 2008). The prize is awarded annually by the Mathematical Association of America to an outstanding book in mathematics that is likely to improve the public view of the field. More info here.

Cambridge Centre for Analysis (CCA), Ph.D. degrees
The pioneering Cambridge Centre for Analysis opened its door in October 2010 to 14 new Ph.D. students, who will be exposed to a wide range of interdisciplinary aspects of modern mathematical analysis. More info.

Caucher Birkar awarded prestigous prizes
Dr. Birkar was awarded the 2010 Prix de la Fondation des Sciences Mathématiques de Paris as well as the 2010 Philip Leverhulme prize. These prizes are intended for "outstanding scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, recognised at an international level, and where the expectation is that their greatest achievement is yet to come."

Part III now results in a degree
Part III is a one-year Masters level course taken by over 200 students every year from around the world. The course is delivered since at least 1883 in one form or another. The new degree, Master of Advanced Studies, replaces the Certificate of Advanced Studies, delivered since 1980. More info.

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