DECEMBER 2015, NO 1

School of Mathematics Newsletter

It is a pleasure to write this forward for the first School of Mathematics Newslet-ter. These newsletters will become a regular fixture and will be used to promotethe many good aspects of the School throughout the University and beyond. I amgrateful to Andrew Treglown whose idea this was and who has agreed to take onthis activity.The session began well with the LMS-EMS Mathematical Weekend and ended withDavid Smith’s outstanding grant success, which will no doubt be a feature of afuture edition of the Newsletter. These activities do much to promote the excellentresearch that takes place within the School. On the education front, the Curricu-lum Review has reached into the final stages of our undergraduate programmesand is running very smoothly. This will no doubt enhance our already excellentNSS position.

— Paul Flavell

Staff UpdateThis term we have welcomed a number of new

academic staff to the School of Mathematics. In par-ticular, after some excellent grant success within theSchool, a number of new researchers have arrived.

Dr Andrew McDowell joined the maths depart-ment in September as a Research Fellow workingwith Richard Mycroft. His background is largely inprobabilistic combinatorics and initially has beenlooking at perturbation problems relating to combi-nations of extremal and random hypergraph struc-ture. Extremal results give sharp boundary condi-tions for when some desired structure must appearbut it is often possible to show that if a small num-ber of random alterations are allowed then signifi-cantly weaker boundary conditions will suffice, al-lowing insight into the stability and resilience of im-portant structural properties of hypergraphs.

Also joining the Combinatorics group is Dr Felix

Joos, as a postdoctoral researcher of Daniela Kühn.He got his PhD in June 2015 in Ulm, Germany underthe supervision of Dr Dieter Rautenbach. His exper-tise covers structural graph theory as well as proba-bility theory and its applications in discrete mathe-matics.

Dr Guillem Perarnau joined the Combinatoricsgroup in September as a Research Fellow, workingwith Daniela Kühn and Deryk Osthus. In January,he will become a Lecturer in the School of Math-ematics. Guillem’s main research interest is in theuse of probabilistic techniques to study both deter-ministic and typical properties of sparse discrete ob-jects. A particular case of it, is on the analysis ofnon-classical random graphs models. These randomstructures can be used as a natural model for nu-merous real-world complex networks (such as so-cial, transport or neural networks) and provide away to understand them better.

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Dr Guillem Perarnau, Dr Andrew McDowell and Dr Andrew Morris

Dr Jie Han is a Research Fellow from the Uni-versidade de Sao Paulo who is visiting the Univer-sity of Birmingham for the year. He will be workingwith Daniela Kühn and Deryk Osthus on Dirac-typeproblems for uniform hypergraphs, which, roughlyspeaking, concern the extension of classical theo-rems in graphs involving minimum degree condi-tions into hypergraphs. Being a young and emerg-ing area in extremal (hyper)graph theory, Dirac-typeproblems have attracted considerable attention inthe past decade.

Dr Paul Roberts started in the Mathematical Bi-ology group in October. He’ll be working with SaraJabbari to use mathematical models to improvethe efficacy of a novel antibacterial drug being de-veloped by Dr Anne-Marie Krachler’s group in theSchool of Biosciences. The drug works by prevent-ing bacteria from binding to host cells and it’s hopedthat this new type of “anti-virulence” drug will evadesome of the resistance problems associated withconventional antibiotics – mathematical models willhelp us to predict how likely this may be and whatwe can do to prevent drug resistance emerging.

Dr Andrew Morris joined the Analysis Groupas a Lecturer in June. His research is concernedwith the development of modern techniques in har-monic analysis and operator theory for applicationto partial differential equations on Riemannian man-ifolds and rough domains. This includes elliptic sys-

tems with rough coefficients, local T(b) techniques,holomorphic functional calculus, first-order meth-ods, singular integrals, layer potentials, boundaryvalue problems beyond Lipschitz domains, uniformrectifiability, and geometric measure theory. He pre-viously held postdoctoral positions at the Universityof Oxford and the University of Missouri after ob-taining his PhD from the Australian National Uni-versity in 2010.

Also joining the School of Mathematics are twoMarie Sklodowska-Curie Fellows. Dr Rieuwert Blokjoins us from Bowling Green State University andwill be working with Corneliu Hoffman in the Alge-bra group. Dr Jonathan Meddaugh joins from BaylorUniversity and he will be working with Chris Good.Welcome to all new members of staff!

Dr Paul Roberts

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The LMS-EMS mathematical weekend conference photo

LMS-EMS Mathematical Weekend

by RICHARD ELWES

The weekend 18-20 September saw mathemati-cians from around the world congregate at the Uni-versity of Birmingham, for a conference in celebra-tion of two birthdays: the 150th of the venerableLondon Mathematical Society (LMS), and the 25thof the relatively youthful European MathematicalSociety. Under the watch of the Joseph Chamber-lain Memorial Clock-tower (or ‘Old Joe’, the world’stallest free-standing clock-tower), participants di-vided between parallel sessions on the themes ofAlgebra, Combinatorics, and Analysis, and reunitedfor plenary talks from some of mathematics’ currentleading lights.

After warm greetings from Terry Lyons and PavelExner, the two societies’ respective Presidents, andfrom Prof Andrew Schofield, Head of BirminghamUniversity’s College of Engineering and Physical Sci-ences, the meeting got underway with a plenary talkfrom Noga Alon (Tel Aviv and Princeton), on thesubject of Graphs, vectors and integers. His focuswas Cayley Sum Graphs of finite Abelian groups, andthe role they play in subjects from Graph Theory toInformation Theory. Aner Shalev (Jerusalem) laterdelivered the day’s second plenary talk, on Groups inInteraction, discussing several instances of interplaybetween group theory and other subjects, includingprobability theory, algebraic geometry, and numbertheory.

Away from the lecture theatres, mathematicianswere spotted enjoying Balti curry (a famous Birm-

ingham creation, along with the postage stamp andthe pneumatic tyre) and enjoying the outstandingcollection of paintings at the Barber Institute of FineArts, next door to the School of Mathematics.

Stefanie Petermichl (Toulouse) delivered the firstplenary session of Saturday 19th, on Optimal con-trol of second order Riesz transforms on multiply-connected Lie groups, discussing progress on con-trolling the norms of certain classical operators ongroups. She was followed by Béla Bollobás (Cam-bridge and Memphis) speaking on Percolation andrandom cellular automata. He paused during histalk to pay tribute to two friends who had recentlypassed away: Ian Cassels, Head of Mathematics dur-ing his PhD at Cambridge, and Bollobás’s own grad-uate student Charles Read (Leeds). The day’s fi-nal plenary session was from Timothy Gowers onthe subject of Interleaved products in highly non-Abelian groups, an algebraic problem motivated bya question in cryptography.

The conference dinner took place on Satur-day evening in Birmingham University Staff House,where delicious food was consumed, and manyglasses were raised in cheerful celebration of the twosocieties’ birthdays.

Rounding off the meeting on Sunday 20th wasKeith Ball (Warwick), with an entertaining plenarytalk exploring The probabilistic character of high-dimensional objects. Then with hearty thanks to theorganisers, Chris Parker, Anton Evseev, Maria Car-men Reguera and Andrew Treglown, and with con-gratulations to Elisa Covato (Bristol) and RobertHancock (Birmingham) winners of the graduate stu-dent poster competition, an excellent celebratory

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weekend drew to a close.[Kindly reproduced from the EMS newsletter, De-

cember 2015, p6]

MathSoc Updateby SARAH GRAVES

What a start to the year!We began by welcoming the first years in the

traditional manner: after sorting them into ‘fami-lies’ they went around campus on a scavenger hunt,learning the location of their new lecture rooms inthe process. Then came the family quiz and pizza af-ternoon which was a great success! We also had anight out to the student event Stuesdays in the citycentre in the middle of October, allowing all years tomix together at the Lounge in Selly Oak beforehand.For those who prefer a quieter night, we also hosteda film night and watched ‘A Beautiful Mind’.

We have plenty coming up in the near future.November’s MathSoc Annual Bar Crawl on BroadStreet was a sell out and was bigger than ever be-fore! We also have a board games night, charityarchery and a Christmas night out (of course!) alongwith our Careers Networking Evening coming up.

Next semester sees our annual MathSoc on Tourevent and this year we are heading to Dublin! Weare also teaming up with (our arch rivals) Eco-nomics to do pub golf through Selly Oak, takinga trip to Bletchley Park paired with an ‘ImitationGame’ movie night, and of course our Annual SpringBall. We will be supporting our charity of the year‘Teenage Cancer Trust’ by running the Coventry HalfMarathon and hosting an EPS University Challengeas part of the Guild ‘Adopt a charity week’, so we cantruly see who the cleverest society in the College ofEngineering and Physical Sciences (EPS) is.

News in brief

• Congratulations to Dr John Meyer and Pro-fessor David Needham for being awarded theSeptember ‘Best paper of the month in EPS’award for their monograph ‘The Cauchy Prob-lem for Non-Lipschitz Semi-Linear ParabolicPartial Differential Equations’.

• On Thursday 10th December there is a grad-uation ceremony for a number of the School’spostgraduate students. Congratulations to all

graduands, the School of Mathematics wouldlike to wish you every success in your futurecareers!

• The School of Mathematics Christmas partytakes place from 6-8pm on Thursday 10th De-cember on the Physics Bridge. All staff and stu-dents are welcome!

• Donna Testerman, a professor at EPFL (Lau-sanne) who is a world leading expert inthe subgroup structure and representationtheory of algebraic groups, visited Birm-ingham the week of November 22. Sheand Kay Magaard are working on branch-ing problems related to the structure ofthe maximal subgroups of the finite clas-sical groups. Together with Tim Burness(Bristol), and Gunter Malle (Kaiserslautern)they are organizing a workshop on “Branch-ing Problems for Reductive Groups” in May2016 at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stock-holm, Sweden. For more information see:http://www.mittag-leffler.se/workshop/branching-problems-reductive-groups

• On Wednesday 20th January, there will be aone-day meeting in Birmingham on represen-tations of groups, with three speakers, form-ing part of the LMS Triangle in group theory,which has meetings in Birkbeck, Birmingham,Manchester and Bristol throughout the aca-demic year.

• The newly established joint research group‘The Mathematical Ecology: Theory and Ap-plications (META)’ is hosted by the Schools ofMathematics at the University of Birmingham,the University of Essex and the University ofLeicester. The first META workshop, ‘Analyti-cal and computational methods for multiscaleecology’, will be held on 18th December 2015in our School. Further information about theworkshop (including the programme and ab-stracts) is available at http://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/N.B.Petrovskaya/BM.htm

• Alex Bespalov and Daniel Loghin are host-ing a meeting on January 5-6 2016 here inBirmingham on ‘Adaptive Algorithms for Com-putational PDEs’. For more information see:http://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/A.Bespalov/adapt16_workshop/index.html

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