News

Congratulations to Viveka Erlandsson,  Lecturer in Mathematics, who has been promoted to Associate Professor. She obtained her PhD from City University of New York in 2013.  Viveka joined the School of Mathematics at Bristol University in 2017.  Her research interests are in the fields of hyperbolic geometry, low-dimensional topology, and Teichmüller theory. Lately, she has been particularly interested in topics concerning curves on surfaces and geodesic currents.

Congratulations to Bálint Tόth who has been elected Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 

Congratulations to Irene Pasquinelli

Congratulations to Scott Harper

Congratulations to Scott Harper who has been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (held in St Andrews) for his project “Group Generation: From Finite to Infinite”. The Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship is a highly prestigious, fiercely competitive award. It provides career development opportunities for researchers who are at a relatively early stage of their academic careers but who have a proven record of research.

Scott joined the School of Mathematics and the Heilbronn Institute following his PhD from Bristol in 2019 supervised by Tim Burness.  His research is in group theory, and lots of his work involves exploiting the fundamental role of simple groups, the building blocks of symmetry. Scott was awarded the gold medal at STEM for Britain in parliament last year for his research in group theory. His paper (with Tim Burness and Robert Guralnick) published in Annals of Mathematics (arxiv preprint) proved some long-standing questions about the generation of finite groups, including the question: “In which finite groups is every nontrivial element contained in a generating pair?”

We wish Scott every success in his future research.

Date: 1st June 2022

Wolfson Foundation Support Professor Ken McLaughlin to join the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol

The School of Mathematics welcomes Professor Ken McLaughlin, Department Chair and Professor of Mathematics at Colorado State University (CSU), who will join us this year after being awarded the prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellowship. These fellowships enable exceptional international researchers to undertake a flexible 12-month period of sabbatical leave to join a UK university, to foster international collaboration and enrich scientific research.

Professor McLaughlin’s research has its origins in the description of natural phenomena, like the tidal bore on the Severn River, and now connects to many different applications, including the study of complex random systems. Known for his collaborative research, Professor McLaughlin will also be delivering postgraduate courses during his time at Bristol, to support the University’s early-career research community.

Professor Phil Taylor, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, said: ‘These Fellowships are a fantastic opportunity for the University of Bristol and we are extremely grateful to the Royal Society and the Wolfson Foundation. Academic collaboration and knowledge sharing is integral for a healthy and vibrant research community and we are delighted to welcome these three renowned academics to Bristol.’

The Wolfson Foundation is an independent charity with a focus on research and education. Its aim is to support civil society by investing in excellent projects in science, health, heritage, humanities and the arts. Since it was established in 1955, some £1 billion (£2 billion in real terms) has been awarded to more than 14,000 projects throughout the UK, all on the basis of expert review.

Date:  10 January 2022

Statisticians Appointed as Turing Fellows in 2021-2022

Congratulations to the new Turing Fellows from the Institute of Statistical Science, School of Mathematics. We are also pleased to see a number of fellows returning for the 2021-2022 academic year. Read more

Date: October 2021

Congratulation to Tim Burness

Congratulations to Tim Burness who has been awarded a University Research Fellowship for the academic year 2021-22 from the University of Bristol to enable him to carry out a dedicated research project.  Supported by the Research Fellowship, Tim is planning a number of collaborative research visits to Padua University, Caltech, EPFL and Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge.  Tim’s main area of research is in group theory.  He is interested in simple groups, both finite and algebraic, with a particular focus on subgroup structure, conjugacy classes and representation theory. He is also interested in permutation groups and related combinatorics, and in the application of probabilistic and computational methods.  Tim has been the Associate Chair of the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research for the last 3 years until July 2021, he played a key role in the Institute’s national portfolio of activity.  He is currently the Editor of the Journal of Algebra and London Mathematical Society Student Texts and Managing Editor of the Journal of Group Theory.

We wish Tim every success in the future.

Date: July 2021

Viveka Erlandsson awarded the LMS Anne Bennett Prize 2021

Congratulations to Viveka Arlandsson, who has been awarded an Anne Bennett Prize from the London Mathematical Society  for her outstanding achievements in geometry and topology and her inspirational active role in promoting women mathematicians.  the LMS offers the Anne Bennett Prize to a mathematician within ten years of their doctorate for work in and influence on mathematics, particularly acting as an inspiration for women mathematicians.

Viveka is an internationally leading mathematician, whose research focuses on low dimensional geometry and topology.  Viveka is actively committed to the promotion of women in mathematics through outreach activities in schools, organisation of events such as Women Lunches and Women in Mathematics Colloquia, and in her service to the European Women in Mathematics Association.  She has also given talks on many occasions specifically designed to encourage female students, including the ‘Women in Mathematics: opportunity for the Future’ undergraduate event hosted in Bristol.

This is a fantastic recognition of her ground-breaking research as well as her contribution to the community.  Viveka is currently writing a book with Juan Souto, called Mirzakhani’s Curve Counting and Geodesic Currents.

David Hume Awarded an EPSRC Fellowship

Congratulations to David Hume who has been awarded a 5-year EPSRC Fellowship (held in Bristol) for his project “Coarse geometry of groups and spaces”.  The Fellowship is designed to support talented and ambitious researchers to deliver research excellence to meet UK and global priorities.  David is currently a Heilbronn Fellow and his research is focused on geometric group theory, Gromov hyperbolic groups and their generalisations and coarse geometry and embeddings.

He completed his PhD entitled ‘Embeddings of infinite groupsinto Banach spaces‘ in 2013 at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Cornelia Drutu.  David worked with Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace at UCLouvain and with Romain Tessera at Université Paris-Sud, Orsay. Before arriving at the Heilbronn Institute in October 2020 David was a Titchmarsh Research Fellow in the Topology group at the University of Oxford, a Junior Research Fellow at St Cross College and an Enterprise Fellow of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division (MPLS).

We wish David every success in his future research.

Date: May 2021