2020 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced today.

The first thing that I noticed was that my Mathematical Institute (Unversity of Oxford) colleague Roger Penrose got half the prize. Additionally, Andrea Ghez from UCLA's physics department shared the other half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel. Ghez also got a Ph.D. from Caltech in 1992, so several of my institutions (and my former home department at Oxford!) did very well today. Congratulations!

Here is the terse citation: 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 with one half to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity" and and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy".

Some other websites to look at are the popular blurb and more advanced information from the Nobel page. Additionally, here are UCLA's press release and a blurb from University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute.

Dame Frances Kirwan Named "Savilian Professor" at University of Oxford!

Here is some really big news: "Dame Frances Kirwan has been elected to the Savilian Professorship at the University of Oxford. Frances will be the 20th holder of the Savilian Chair (founded in 1619), and is the first woman to be elected to any of the historic chairs in mathematics."

This is a very big deal. (See the Wikipedia entry for a discussion of this professorship.)

I know Frances. (We were colleagues in the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford, of course) She is awesome (both as a mathematician and as a person).

Frances is somebody who is well-known within mathematics but pretty much unheard of outside mathematics.

Congratulations to Sandy Patel!

Support staff member Sandy Patel of University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute won the Oxford University Students Union award for best support staff. Congratulations!

Credit where it is due on two counts:

(1) Sandy is a very good member of support staff! I have interacted with support staff at many places, and good ones versus bad ones make a huge difference in academic experience. Sandy always stood out during my time at Oxford as one of the really good ones. The number of times I have told my students to 'Go ask Sandy Patel." (and similar) is very numerous indeed.

(2) And credit to my former employer (the Oxford Mathematical Institute) for publishing Sandy's award on their website and circulating it on Twitter. This type of recognition is almost always in the background and it shouldn't be. (I learned this from grad school, where we had the awesome Dolores Pendell, versus nearly everywhere else I have been.) We spend a lot of time bragging about the scientific accomplishments of faculty (and occasionally also their teaching accomplishments, though not enough), but we almost never publicize things when our support staff are excellent (though we do complain loudly when they're not), and we should!

Sonyalytic Acquired by Spotify

OK, but what does that have to do with me?

Well, Martin Gould is CEO of Sonalytic, which was just acquired by Spotify! Very well done!

Advertisement: Faculty Position in Networks and Nonlinear Systems, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford

Oxford has now advertised my old job, which is for an Associate Professorship or Professorship in the Mathematical Institute. The advertisement is for somebody in Networks and Nonlinear Systems.

Go apply for it!

Oxford Mathematics Alphabet: "'H' is for Homology"

The latest entry in the Oxford Mathematics Alphabet, 'H' is for Homology, is out today.

It was written by doctoral students Bernadette Stolz (my collaborator and my former masters student, who I cosupervised with Heather Harrington, who is Bernadette's main doctoral supervisor) and Barbara Mahler (my doctoral student, who I am supervising along with Heather Harrington and Ulrike Tilmann).

What's Lurking in the OCIAM Drawers?

While trying to find an envelope to mail stuff (none in the mail room), I check in the drawers under one set of Mathematical Institute printers, I found reams of paper (of course), a few technical books, a book about what to do if one gets pregnant, and the supply of the old (from more than a decade ago) OCIAM t-shirts.

I couldn't find an envelope large enough to mail the book I want to send, but I wonder if the t-shirt that I bought almost 9 years ago was the last new one anybody acquired.

My Life as an Initial Condition for a Reaction–Diffusion System

This is what happens when I am used as an initial condition in a reaction–diffusion system.

This animated gif is a very cool "departing gif(t)" from Oxford Mathematical Institute postdoc Thomas Woolley.

It's a Small World After All: Part N

A very cool "small world" vignette from my current trip: One of the people who has attended many of my lectures at University of Costa Rica (10 hours in 3 days, and then 1 more hour today at a different campus) is a computer science professor whose sister is my Oxford mathematics colleague Xenia de la Ossa (with whom I have worked extensively for our recently-born masters program in mathematical and theoretical physics).

Academics are spread around the world and we get to travel to many interesting and diverse places, and it's simultaneously a small world. Both of these are great things.

Somerville Mathematics Undergraduate Brigitte Stenhouse Wins Dissertation Prize!

Somerville mathematics undergraduate student Brigitte Stenhouse (who just graduated this year) won a Gibbs dissertation prize for her thesis on Mary Somerville! This is a best-thesis prize for Oxford's 4th-year mathematics and statistics (and sometimes computer science) students.

Today Somerville College posted a press release about Brigitte's prize along with a short interview of Brigitte, who plans to get a Ph.D. in the history of mathematics but is first working for a year in Somerville's development office. Here is my favorite quote of Brigitte's from the interview: It made me question why we value the mathematics we do, why we learn the mathematics we do in school and university, and why it is all named after Cauchy.

Inference Club

The Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford now has an "Inference Club".

Which leads me to... First Rule of Inference Club: you ought to be able to figure it out.

Teaching Complex Systems: Building Evacuation Edition

Today I gave my first lecture for my course on complex systems. After about the first hour (of the 2 hours), the fire alarm rang, and we had to evacuate the building.

So I did what any self-respecting person in complex systems would do: briefly as we walked outside and much more once outside and as we watched others leaving the building through the door, while we were outside being drizzled on, I gave a brief description of the work of people like Dirk Helbing on that exact problem.

(And then after we got back inside, I showed them the video of sheep moving through a bottleneck.)

Andrew Wiles Wins 2016 Abel Prize

The home team won big today: my Mathematical Institute colleague Andrew Wiles has won the 2016 Abel Prize!

40th Birthday

Yesterday I turned 40. It happens to everybody (unless they die at a younger age, of course).

My research group banded together to give me a birthday present at Networks Journal Club today!

First, we have a multilayer network of (most) current members and several former members of my group. In fact, it is an induced subgraph, with me as the ego node. (If you take a look, it seems like one should ponder a bit about how to define an induced subgraph in a multilayer context.) The layers are defined by membership in Somerville College, coauthorship of papers, and Facebook friendship. (There are no interlayer edges, so technically this is an edge-colored multigraph.) Today’s talk included some calculations on this network.

Second, they bought me a plush ankylosaurus (aka: best dinosaur ever!), and some of my students noticed that that was the type of plush dinosaur I really wanted to get as a child but never actually saw in a store.

Oxford's 2015 Mathematical Bake-Off

Pictures from the Mathematical Institute's 2015 mathematical bake-off are now posted!

The Menger sponge cake, which was the winning entry in the undergraduate-cake category, was created by two of our students (Louise O'Rourke and Sndrew Tweddle) in Somerville. Excellent job!

Don't Drink the Water (and Don't Breathe the Air)

Apparently, the news (rather ambiguously phrased, too) out of the Andrew Wiles Building is "Don't drink the water."

As the most recent e-mail indicates, "there may be a problem with the drinking water supply". And remember how the word "may" gets used in that context in the UK...

So, in honor of the situation, here is an appropriate song.

Mapping Locations with Three Words

If I matched things up correctly, my Mathematical Institute office is located at "twist.learn.curiosity" (and other nearby coordinates).

And if it's not me, then my three Ph.D. students next to me have those coordinates.

The entrance to my flat in Somerville is roughly at the location "accent.slim.inspector". (Now where was that diamond...)

(Tip of the cap to Sam Howison, who apparently now has much more time on his hands since he stopped being department head on 1 October.)

Bumps in a Carpet

Here is my latest post for the Improbable Research blog. You'll notice that I was discussing work by a few of my Oxford colleagues.

A Drone's Eye View of Oxford's Mathematical Institute

The drone's tour of our building would have been much more realistic if it had gotten stuck inside an elevator.

Multilayer Network Gelatin Cakes

My student Flora Meng made some multilayer network gelatin cakes.

Her efforts were part of the recently mathematical bake-off that was held by the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford. (I am sure I will have more pictures to post soon enough.) I've included a picture of one of Flora's desserts in the post, and you can click on the link for two other pictures that will allow you to see the rest of Flora's handiwork.