OCTOBER 2017, NO 7

School of Mathematics Newsletter

In this issue:• Farewell Kay• Staff update• Outreach update• Recent and forthcomingworkshops and conferences

Farewell Kay

by SIMON GOODWIN AND CHRIS PARKER

Kay Magaard was part of our School for aboutten years. He is world-renowned for major ad-vances in finite group theory and group representa-tions, most famously, the solution of the Guralnick-Thompson conjecture about composition factors ofmonodromy groups, and his contributions to the re-search in the algebra group will be missed. A tes-tament to Kay’s enthusiasm and breadth in math-ematics is that during his years with us, he hasworked on joint research projects with most mem-bers of the algebra group. In collaboration withChris and Ben Fairbairn significant progress wasmade on the theory of Beauville groups with a reso-lution of the Bauer, Catanese and Grunewald conjec-ture. His work with Sergey and Adam James, “Thelift invariant distinguishes components of Hurwitzspaces for A5”, won the paper of the month awardand appeared in the Proceedings of the AMS in2015. His work with Simon, Tung Le and AlessandroPaolini focused on the representation theory of Sy-low subgroups of Chevalley groups. In a joint projectwith Hoff, Bob Guralnick and Dan Frohardt, he isworking towards a full classification of small genuscovers of the projective line.

The School of Mathematics wishes to thank Kayfor all his contributions to the University over the last10 years and wishes him the very best of luck with hisfuture endeavours!

New staffDr John Meyer was appointed as a lecturer in

the School of Mathematics in June. John’s researchinterests are in applied analysis of nonlinear PDEs.In particular, he is interested in maximum princi-ples for solutions to differential inequalities, dynam-ical systems, optimal regularity theory for solutionsto boundary value problems for PDEs, and well-posedness of boundary value problems for nonlinearPDEs.

Dr Yuzhao Wang joined the School of Mathemat-ics in September as a Lecturer. Yuzhao’s primary re-search area is mathematical analysis of nonlineardispersive partial differential equations (PDEs), withtools from harmonic analysis, probability theory, anddynamical systems. In particular, he is interested inStrichartz estimates and its applications to disper-sive nonlinear PDEs, probabilistic aspects of nonlin-ear dispersive PDEs, and the normal form methodapplied to nonlinear dispersive PDEs.

The Jinan team

Dr Robert Leek joined Birmingham in Au-gust as part of the Jinan flying faculty. His back-ground is in general topology, specifically onconvergence properties (such as radiality and

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Fréchet-Urysohn) and structures that charac-terise these. Recently, Robert has begun tran-sitioning to topological dynamics and will beworking with Professor Chris Good on induceddynamical systems and non-metrisable systems.He also has interests in logic, infinite combina-torics, and surreal numbers.

Dr Sam Johnson was born in Seville andstudied physics at the University of Granada,where he completed his PhD in 2011. He hassince worked as a postdoc at Oxford, a MarieCurie research fellow at Imperial College, anda lecturer at Warwick, before moving to Birm-ingham as a lecturer in August. Sam’s researchis in complex systems, with a focus on the rela-tionship between structure and dynamics, anddraws from quite disparate fields – such as sta-tistical physics, graph theory, and agent-basedmodelling. While studying food webs – net-works of who eats whom in an ecosystem –Sam discovered a topological property of di-rected networks called ‘trophic coherence’ (seeWikipedia: Trophic Coherence). Together withvarious colleagues he has since shown thatthis property is important for many aspects ofcomplex, dynamical systems. Sam is currentlystudying how network science can be appliedto car electronics, why the neural network ofthe brain develops as it does, and how war andpeace depend on geography.

Dr Fabian Spill

Dr Fabian Spill is a new lecturer in themathematical biology group. He is interestedin both the development of novel mathematicaland computational methods to investigate mul-tiscale problems in biology, and in the applica-tion of such methods to solve relevant biologi-cal problems. Some of his recent work has fo-cused on the influence of mechanics and geom-

etry on the molecular state of cells, which thusultimately changes the behaviour of the cells.Moreover, he has been developing stochasticmultiscale methods to investigate how noise ona small scale can change macroscopic.

Dr Feng Xu joined the Numerical Analy-sis group in June as a Research Fellow, work-ing with Alex Bespalov. In his current projecthe is developing adaptive stochastic finite el-ement algorithms for partial differential equa-tions with random inputs. Prior to this project,he also carried out research in hydrodynam-ics and biofluid dynamics. His research aim isto analyse mathematical models from the realworld by using a combination of analytical anal-ysis and numerical simulation.

Dr Michelle Delcourt joined the Combina-torics group in September as a Research Fel-low. Delcourt’s main area of expertise is usingprobabilistic techniques to solve problems fromextremal and structural graph theory. Workingwith Will Perkins, she currently is using ap-proaches motivated from statistical physics tostudy graph coloring questions. She earned herPhD in May 2017 from the University of Illinois,under the direction of József Balogh.

Dr Ethan Liu

Dr Zhengliang Liu (a.k.a Ethan) joined themaths department in June as a Research Fellowworking with Sergey Sergeev. He received hisPhD from Lancaster University in 2016 special-ising in multi-objective optimisation. Namely,he looked into the problem of optimising overthe Pareto set of a multi-objective optimisa-tion problem. This problem is closely related tobilevel programming and game theory. Ethan’sresearch interests includes theoretical and algo-rithmic aspects of multi-objective optimisationand bilevel programming problems.

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Dr Sam Johnson, Dr Michelle Delcourt and Dr Feng Xu

Outreach in Mathematics

by ELEANOR MESTEL

Staff from the School have been involved in awide variety of Outreach and Public Engagementevents over the spring and summer. These eventscontribute to the perception of Birmingham as acentre of excellence for interesting mathematical re-search and, by extension, an outstanding place tostudy. They are part of the ongoing outreach thathas had such a positive effect on our recruitmentand admissions, as well as being worthwhile publicengagement. Thank you to all who have contributedin the last few years.

The Birmingham Popular Mathematics Lecturesare once a month throughout the autumn and springterms. Over the last few years, these have grown sothat we now regularly attract over 100 attendeesfrom local schools, families, and the general pub-lic, as well as the university. On the 20th Septem-ber, this year’s LMS popular lectures began the2017/18 series, with 220 people attending. ThePopular Maths Lecture series will continue once amonth on Wednesday evenings in the Watson Build-ing (Lecture Theatre A), starting at 7pm (note ear-lier timing). On 18th October, Dr Peter Neumannwill be asking, “Did Galois deserve to be shot?”. On29th November, Professor Paul Flavell will be do-ing a repeat of his Inaugural lecture, “Numbers”.The details of the upcoming lectures are online:www.birmingham.ac.uk/bpml.

Staff from the department have been involved ina wide variety of outreach events, trips to schools,and campus visits aimed at under-18s. In March,our largest maths event, the Maths Big Quiz, ranwith 324 14-15 year olds attending from 30 local

schools, and some staff ran centrally organised mas-terclasses. Thank you to Dr Sara Jabbari and DrRosemary Dyson for their help. In June, the busi-est time of year for these events, Dr Chris Good gavea workshop “Harry Potter and the Mathemagicians”for the EPS Discovery Day, and we ran the Math-ematics Taster Day for 77 students thinking aboutstudying mathematics at university. Of those stu-dents, 22 spent the whole week at the Universityin Work Experience Week, run jointly by ProfessorDave Smith here in maths, and others in computerscience.

A full list of our mathematics-specific Outreachevents can be found on the outreach webpage. Ikeep a list of any outreach or public engagementdone in the School, so please keep me updated aboutany outreach you do which is not organised by me.This year’s events should run again next year, andif you are interested in getting involved, giving apopular lecture or a workshop, or know someonewho might be, please do let me know. I am alwayslooking for more help with outreach events, and amvery happy to talk about your outreach and pub-lic engagement ideas, just send me an email (liai-son@maths.bham.ac.uk) or see me in Room 218 inthe Watson Building.

News in Brief

• From August 5th to 13th the School ofMathematics hosted the international con-ference ‘Groups St Andrews’. Organised byChris Parker, the conference was a huge suc-cess with more than 200 participants. Theprincipal speakers were: Michael Aschbacher(Caltech); Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace (Univer-

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sité Catholique de Louvain); Radha Kessar(City, University of London); and Gunter Malle(TU Kaiserslautern). Further one-hour invitedtalks were given by: Tim Burness (Universityof Bristol); Vincent Guirardel (Université deRennes 1); Harald Helfgott (University of Göt-tingen); Andrei Jaikin-Zapirain (UniversidadAutónoma de Madrid); and Donna Testerman(École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).

In addition to the plenary lectures there werecontributed talks by over 100 of the attendees.Hoff and Sergey led a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon for the excursion while Chris took about70 people to Warwick Castle. There was also atrip to the Two Towers brewery.

• A 2-day workshop entitled ‘Interactions withCombinatorics’ was held on 29-30 June 2017at University of Birmingham. The aim of theworkshop was to explore the interactions be-tween Combinatorics and other mathemati-cal fields; focusing both on how recent tech-niques in Combinatorics have been applied toother areas of Mathematics and conversely,how tools from other areas can be appliedin Combinatorics. The event was attended bymore than 50 mathematicians. Most attendeeswere from UK universities but we attracted anumber of international researchers (e.g. fromthe USA, Spain, China, Ireland, South Korea,Australia and Mexico!).

More details of the event can be found on theworkshop’s webpage.

• The Sixth IMA Conference on Numerical Lin-ear Algebra and Optimization will be heldhere in the School of Mathematics, 27-29 June2018. The event is co-chaired by Michal Koc-vara and Daniel Loghin. The invited speak-ers are: Amir Beck (Technion Haifa); JulianHall (University of Edinburgh); Misha Kilmer(Tufts University); Dominique Orban (Poly-technique Montréal); Alison Ramage (Univer-sity of Strathclyde); Francoise Tisseur (Univer-sity of Manchester); Luis Nunes Vicente (Uni-versity of Coimbra); and Steve Wright (Uni-versity of Wisconsin). More details about theevent can be found here.

• From 29 July to 2 August 2019, the School ofMathematics will host the 27th British Com-

binatorial Conference. This conference serieshas been running since 1969 and is the maininternational combinatorics conference held inthe UK. The organisers are Allan Lo, RichardMycroft, Guillem Perarnau and Andrew Tre-glown. The invited speakers are: Penny Hax-ell (Waterloo); Michael Krivelevich (Tel Aviv);Dan Král’ (Warwick); Kristin Lauter (MicrosoftResearch and University of Washington); Hen-drik van Maldeghem (Ghent); Iain Moffatt(Royal Holloway); Igor Pak (UCLA); DanielPaulusma (Durham); and Gábor Tardos (Si-mon Fraser and Rényi Institute).

• Sara Jabbari recently received an MRC Prox-imity to Discovery award so that she and re-search fellow Paul Roberts can travel to theUSA to meet a company called Ironclad Bio-sciences who are interested in using mathe-matical modelling to inform the developmentof novel antibacterials.

• The inaugural lecture series will continue onthe afternoon of November 8th. Recently ap-pointed staff will give seminars on their re-search, followed by dinner at the White Swanin Edgbaston. Chris Parker will send out moredetails in due course.

• A reminder that the College of Engineeringand Physical Sciences welcomes entries for the‘paper of the month’ award. Anyone interestedin submitting a paper for this award shouldcontact Chris Parker. Prize winners will re-ceive 1000 pounds towards research expendi-ture. Recent winners of this award include Pe-ter Butkovic, Rosemary Dyson, Daniela Kühn,Allan Lo, John Meyer, Deryk Osthus, DavidNeedham and Andrew Treglown.

• The next Mathematics Colloquium will begiven by Professor Marta Mazzocco (Lough-borough) on Wednesday 25th October (4pm inLecture Room A of the Watson Building). Herresearch interests lie in the area of IntegrableSystems, specialising in monodromy preserv-ing deformations of linear systems, Poisson al-gebras and their quantisation.

• The School of Mathematics has money avail-able to partially support staff in organisingresearch conferences and workshops. Please

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contact your head of group if you are inter-ested in this.

• The College Research Travel fund is continu-ing this year, on the same basis as before. Thatis, there is up to 1000 pounds per academicin the financial year. Money can be spent ontravel related to research (and could also payfor visitors to come here). Requests should bedirected to the School Operations Manager,

Anna Jenkin.

• Congratulations to the following studentswho have passed their PhD vivas recently:David Beltran; Valentina Grazian; Craig Hol-loway; Daniel Jones; Wei En Tan; Brain Tay-lor; Cristina Villanueva Segovia; and GuohanZhang. The School wishes them well for theirfuture careers!

Groups St Andrews in Birmingham 2017

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