Mathematics & joint degrees

I am the Ben Delo Fellow in Mathematics at Worcester College and a Departmental Lecturer in the Mathematical Institute. I grew up in West Yorkshire but have been entirely in Oxford since 1988 when I arrived as an undergraduate studying mathematics. In the College I have done various other roles: Tutor for Admissions, Tutor for Graduates, SCR Steward and Vice-Provost. In the Department I was the Outreach Officer and Admissions Coordinator for a decade and then the Director of Undergraduate Studies for a further decade. During 2022/23 I was Worcester’s choice to act as the University Assessor.

I have been with the College since 1999 and teach a range of topics across pure and applied mathematics. Ben Delo – who has endowed two fellowships in the college – was in fact one of my earliest students at the College. My first interests were in geometry and topology, but whilst being the Outreach Officer I broadened my interests so as to represent the Department as widely as possible and now teach across much of mathematics. A lot of my work has focused on the transition from school/college to higher education and I used to run a bridging course for new mathematics students who had not taken Further Mathematics A-level. For over twenty years I have been involved with Sutton Trust summer schools, UNIQ summer schools and more recently Opportunity Oxford.

Dr Earl’s research interests were originally in geometry and topology but, during his time as the admissions co-ordinator and schools liaison officer in the department, his teaching interests have broadened and he now promotes mathematics at access events across a wide range of topics.

• Towards Higher Mathematics (CUP, 2017)
• Topology: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2019)
• Concise Oxford Dictionary in Mathematics 6ed (OUP, 2021)
• Mathematical Analysis: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2023)

I moved to Oxford from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where I was Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Before then I was a postdoc at UC Berkeley for six and a half years, in the Departments of Demography and Statistics, following stints at the Technical University of Delft and the Technical University of Berlin. I completed my PhD in probability theory in the Harvard University Department of Mathematics in 1996, working with Persi Diaconis.

I am currently interested primarily in biological and demographic questions connected with ageing and mortality. I have been working on improving the probability-theory machinery that underlies some theoretical analyses of the evolution of ageing, and developing statistical methods that help to bring together experiments with these theories. This has largely been in the area of survival analysis, but I have also increasingly been concerned with Bayesian methods for analysing longitudinal data. My demographic interests have branched out to include the human sex ratio and genetic determinants of human life history traits.

I continue to work on fundamental questions of stochastic processes, in particular the behaviour of stochastic flows, the asymptotics of killed Markov processes, and the growth rates of populations dynamics in random environments.

Endre completed his doctorate in Mathematics at the University of Belgrade in 1985. He was appointed to an academic position at Oxford in the same year. He is now Professor of Numerical Analysis and a Fellow and Tutor in Mathematics. Endre is a Foreign Member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc), a Member of the Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Mathematical and numerical analysis of nonlinear partial differential equations; finite element methods, particularly:

• Kinetic models for polymers; Navier-Stokes-Fokker-Planck systems; construction and mathematical analysis of numerical algorithms for high-dimensional Fokker-Planck equations
• Implicitly constituted material models
• Numerical analysis of free-discontinuity problems, computational modelling of fracture, and quasi-continuum methods
• Adaptive algorithms for partial differential equations and a-posteriori error control
• Discontinuous, stabilised, and multiscale finite element methods

View all publications on the Mathematical Institute website

Elizabeth is currently PhD student working in biomedical engineering, with a focus on using generative design and ML methods to optimise computational models. She graduated the Oxford MMath in 2021 and joined the Oxford CDT in Sustainable Approaches to Biomedical Sciences.

Elizabeth tutors first-year mathematics courses in geometry, dynamics, analysis and constructive mathematics.

I am a member of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and am a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford.

My research interests cross the borders between General Topology, Set Theory and Logic. Much of my work involves applications of set theory and set-theoretic combinatorics to topology.

There are a few samples of my current/recent work on my preprints page.

Max completed his MSc and DPhil at Oxford and was a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick before returning to Oxford as a Post-doc. He has been teaching maths and physical chemistry since his DPhil and is also a Post-doc at Princeton University (remotely) and teaches at other colleges.

Max’s research focusses on the interaction of quantum mechanics and chemistry, namely how quantum effects (such as entanglement) can influence the chemistry of materials and reactions, and how we can harvest such effects to our advantage. On a daily basis, this means dealing with noisy open quantum systems, the current frontier of theoretical chemistry. These systems tend to be very hard to model due to the large number of degrees of freedom within the systems, and the inherently stochastic nature of noise within them. But, understanding how these systems transport energy (usually in form of an electronic excitation) is crucial in order to design more advanced materials, for instance for solar energy capture but also for computing.