OCTOBER 2018, NO 10

School of Mathematics Newsletter

In this issue:• Dr Kay Magaard• Memorial conference for Anton Evseev• Staff update• Students win prizes!

Kay MagaardKay left the School at the end of the 2016-17 aca-

demic year after a decade in Birmingham to take upa professorship in Arizona. For the first few monthsof this year he was at the MSRI taking part in theresearch programme on representation theory. Healso travelled extensively continuing and forming re-search collaborations in Africa, India and Germany.

Kay died suddenly July 26, 2018 in Toronto,Canada. The School shares sympathy with his wifeTerrie, two children Lorenz and Carlo and his par-ents Lorenz and Ursula.

Kay was brought up in Honolulu and stud-ied in Germany and the USA. He was an interna-tional research leader recognised for his contribu-tions to finite group theory and representation the-ory. He wrote joint papers with Simon Goodwin,Corneliu Hoffman, Chris Parker and Sergey Shpec-torov; David Craven regularly took advantage ofKay’s extensive knowledge on the subgroups of ex-ceptional groups.

Though Kay had left the School, his friendshipsand collaborations continued. We will miss himdearly.

His mathematical legacy will live on through hisworks.

David, Chris, Hoff, Sergey, Simon

Representations of groups and Heckealgebras: A conference in memory of An-ton Evseev

by SIMON GOODWIN

Colleagues and friends of our former colleagueAnton Evseev gathered for a conference in his mem-ory in September. There were talks on a range oftopics in which Anton’s research has had an impactincluding talks by his collaborators and his formerPhD students. Many tributes were made to Anton’senthusiasm for research, and collaborators sharedstories about how much they enjoyed working withhim. A colloquium talk on "Representations of finitegroups" was given by Gunter Malle, which gave anoverview of the status of a number of conjecturesin modular representation theory, and pointed outareas where Anton’s research had contributed. Thiswas followed by a drinks reception and a conferencedinner. The conference was closed by Chris Parkercommenting on how he thought Anton would haveenjoyed the conference, and how it was a fitting trib-ute.

Dr Anton Evseev

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Farewell Tracy and Janetteby ANDREW TREGLOWN

After 10 years of dedicated service, Tracey Nes-bitt has recently left the School. Janette Lowe is alsoleaving after 22 years in the department. Both willbe sincerely missed by their colleagues.

Janette in particular has helped hundreds ofgraduate students within the School of Mathemat-ics, and has seen many of those students moveon to lectureships here in Birmingham. During hertime at the University a widespread convention wasadopted; if in doubt, “ask Janette”! With the depar-ture of Tracey and Janette so to leaves a great dealof experience and knowledge. Thank you both forall your help over the years!

New staffDr Andrea Brini (PhD SISSA Trieste, 2009)

joined the School of Mathematics in September as aSenior Lecturer in the Geometry and MathematicalPhysics group. His past appointments include post-doctoral stints at Geneva, Imperial College (twice,first as a Marie Curie Fellow) and a permanent re-search position at CNRS in France. He is a mathe-matician with broad interests in Geometry (particu-larly Algebraic Geometry), Topology and Mathemat-ical Physics: his main research topic is the theory oftopological strings and Gromov–Witten invariants,with emphasis on its connections with gauge theory,matrix models, integrable systems, and other modulispace problems. Andrea’s research will be supportedby a five-year EPSRC fellowship starting in Octo-ber awarded for his project ‘Quantum curves, mirrorsymmetry and integrable systems’ (2018-2023).

Joining the same group is Dr Tyler Kelly. Tylerwas a Research Fellow at Cambridge, funded bythe NSF and EPSRC, after obtaining a PhD andBS at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Geor-gia respectively. Tyler has broad research intereststypically centred in Algebraic Geometry, Landau-Ginzburg models and Mirror Symmetry.

Dr Johannes Carmesin is a new Birmingham Fel-low in the School. He is particularly interested inGraph Minors, Connectivity and Matroids. Recentlyhe characterised the simply connected 2-complexesembeddable in 3-space – in a way similar to Kura-towski’s characterisation of graph planarity.

Dr Richard Montgomery joined the School ofMathematics in April this year as a Birmingham Fel-low, returning to Birmingham after a brief time hereas a postdoc in 2015. Richard works in combina-torics, primarily in random and extremal graph the-ory. He received his PhD from the University of Cam-bridge in 2015 under the supervision of AndrewThomason.

Dr Tony Samuel

Dr Tony Samuel joined the University of Birming-ham this August as part of the Jinan flying fac-ulty. His research interests include aperiodic order,Diophantine approximations, dynamical systems, er-godic theory, geometry (fractal, hyperbolic and non-commutative) and Markov chains. Recently, his fo-cus has been on applications of ergodic theory, non-commutative geometry and potential theory to frac-tals and quasicrystals.

Together with Chris Good and Rob Leek, he iskeen to build a lively and active Dynamical Systemsand Topology research group which is pace settingin its international research. Indeed, his first step inthis direction has been to add the University of Birm-ingham to the LMS Ergodic Theory network; otherpartner universities include the University of Bris-tol, University of Exeter, Loughborough University,University of Manchester, Queen Mary University ofLondon, University of St Andrews, University of Sur-rey and University of Warwick.

Tony completed his PhD in 2011 under the su-pervision of Prof. Kenneth Falconer FRS (Universityof St Andrews, Scotland) and Prof. Bernd Stratmann

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Dr Johannes Carmesin, Dr Andrea Brini and Dr Jingyu Huang

(University of Bremen, Germany). Subsequently,Tony was awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Fellowshipand has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Aus-tralian National University. He has held posts at theUniversity of Bremen as a Scientific Researcher (Wis-senschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) and California Polytech-nic State University as an Assistant Professor.

Dr Hong Duong was appointed as a lecturer inmathematical statistics in July 2018. Previously, hewas a Chapman Fellow at Imperial College Londonand a research fellow at the University of Warwick.He defended his PhD in September 2014 jointly be-tween the University of Bath and Eindhoven Uni-versity of Technology. Hong’s research interests liein the intersections of analysis and applied proba-bility. Most of his research is inspired from applica-tions in molecular dynamics, material sciences andbiological systems. Specifically, he has been work-ing on analysis of partial differential equations andinteracting particle systems. Recently, he is also in-terested in establishing links between evolutionarygame theory and random polynomial theory. He isa member of the Jinan team in the School deliver-ing teaching in the Jinan—Birmingham dual degreeundergraduate programmes.

Dr Jingyu Huang has also joined the School aspart of the same team. He obtained his BS in Physicsfrom Nanjing University in 2008 and his PhD fromthe University of Kansas in 2015. He has also helda postdoctoral fellowship at MSRI and was an As-

sistant Professor/Lecturer at the University of Utah.Jingyu’s research interests are Stochastic analysis,Stochastic partial differential equations, Malliavincalculus, fractional Brownian motions and randomfractals.

Dr Arnaud Lionnet joins the School from a Re-search Fellowship at the ENS (Paris). Prior to that hehas held positions at ESIA (Paris), INRIA (Paris) andLady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He received his DPhilfrom Oxford and prior to that he was a student atthe École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Arnaud’s re-search focuses on probabilistic numerical methodsfor partial differential equations and MathematicalFinance.

Claire Churchill joined the School of Mathemat-ics in August as the Admissions and Outreach Of-ficer, covering for Sally Schofield. After graduatingfrom the University of Warwick Claire worked as ascience teacher for a number of years before movinginto the higher education sector. Claire has previ-ously held roles related to STEM Outreach, wideningparticipation, student recruitment and admissionsat both the University of Reading and the LondonSchool of Economics (LSE). Claire’s role within theSchool of Mathematics will include leading on UGadmissions including open days, offer holder daysand communication with applicants, and also man-aging the School’s outreach activities and providingstrategic oversight of outreach across the College.

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Dr Hong Duong, Dr Tyler Kelly and Claire Churchill

Spanish mathematics prize for Birm-ingham alumnus

Dr David Beltran has been awarded the VicentCaselles prize from the Spanish Royal MathematicalSociety and the BBVA Foundation that recognises theoutstanding research of early career Spanish mathe-maticians. David was awarded the prize for his con-tribution to ‘weighted inequalities for the Carleson

maximal operator’ and his ‘important results in thecontrol of pseudo-differential operators related tothe Hormander class for maximal functions’. Davidcompleted his PhD at the School of Mathematics in2017 under the supervision of Jon Bennett and cur-rently holds a postdoctoral position in the BasqueCentre for Applied Mathematics in Bilbao. Congrat-ulations, David!

Young Mathematicians Colloquium

by ALBERTO ESPUNY DÍAZ

Back in the Spring, the University of Birminghamheld the third edition of the Young MathematiciansColloquium, continuing with a tradition that startedthree years ago. This colloquium aims to bring to-gether PhD students and young researchers in everyarea of mathematics from all across the UK and givethem an opportunity to share their more recent dis-coveries and their impressions about academic life;it was a huge success, with over 70 registered par-ticipants and a total of 22 contributed talks and sixinvited speakers.

The talks of the colloquium were divided intoparallel sessions, according to the areas the talksbelonged to. Invited speakers were divided intopure and applied. After the registration, KennethFalconer (University of St Andrews) gave a talkon ‘Results and problems in fractal geometry’,while James Sprittles (University of Warwick) spokeon ‘Nanoscale free surface flows: modelling be-yond Navier-Stokes-Fourier’. After lunch, ValentinaGrazian (University of Aberdeen) and Daniel Jones

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(INRIA and École Polytechnique, now Birmingham!)presented their talks entitled ‘I’m a fusion system,nice to meet you’ and ‘Tropical cellular automata -why urban fires propagate according to polyhedralballs’, respectively. Later, Annika Heckel (Universityof Oxford) and Fabian Spill (University of Birming-ham) talked about ‘Colouring random graphs’ and‘Uncovering the malignant interplay of geometrical,physical and molecular drivers of tumour progres-sion through mathematical models’. Contributedspeakers, coming from a total of twelve differentuniversities, were divided into up to four parallelsessions throughout the day. In addition to the par-ticipants, many other members of the University at-tended several of the talks throughout the day.

The full day of talks was balanced with severalcoffee breaks, a long lunch break and a conferencedinner at Jamie’s Italian. These gave the participantsa chance to interact with one another, discuss thetopics of the day and other topics of interest relatedto the academic life, and establish a network thatwill enable future collaborations.

The colloquium was organised by a group of ourown PhD students: Alexander Brune, Padraig Con-don, Alberto Espuny Díaz and Joel Mitchell. The or-ganisation has received funding from the Universityof Birmingham (via the Postgraduate DevelopmentFund) and the MAGIC group.

Harmonic Analysis and PDE Dayby ALESSIO MARTINI AND SEBASTIANO

NICOLUSSI GOLO

On Tuesday 11 September a ‘Harmonic Anal-ysis and PDE Day’ took place at the Universityof Birmingham. This one-day workshop, fundedby the EPSRC Grant ‘Sub-Elliptic Harmonic Analy-sis’, saw the participation of more than 25 math-ematicians from the UK (Bath, Birmingham, Edin-burgh, Imperial, Oxford, Sussex, Warwick) and over-seas (Croatia, Italy, Germany, Japan). Lectures weregiven by Fulvio Ricci (Scuola Normale Superiore),Neal Bez (Saitama University), Stefan Buschen-henke (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel), andLeonardo Tolomeo (University of Edinburgh), en-compassing a number of topics at the forefront ofresearch in Harmonic Analysis and PDE (harmonicanalysis on homogeneous manifolds, smoothing es-timates for the kinetic transport equation, nonlinearBrascamp–Lieb inequalities, and Gibbs measures forstochastic hyperbolic equations). This fruitful andpleasant day was concluded with a walk to Harborneand an informal dinner at the characteristic Englishpub ‘The Bell’.

Harmonic Analysis and PDE Day

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Best talk prize for Combinatorics PhDstudent

by MATTHEW COULSON

Each year the students of the Jagiellonian Uni-versity organise the International Workshop forYoung Mathematicians in Krakow, Poland. The work-shop is aimed at advanced undergraduate and PhDstudents in any area of maths. This year was the21st time the conference had been run and the maintopic was Combinatorics. We were treated to a num-ber of fantastic lectures from the invited speakers,each giving very understandable introductions totheir area of Combinatorics before presenting some

of their recent results including Hamiltonicity of ran-domly augmented graphs, the Erdos–Hajnal prop-erty and some colouring problems arising from the1-2-3 conjecture. Students were also able to givea talk and I spoke on ‘The Lopsided Lovász LocalLemma and Rainbow Substructures’. I gave an out-line of how one can combine the local lemma withswitchings to find rainbow substructures at extremalthresholds. I was awarded the prize for best stu-dent talk at the conference against a large num-ber of nice talks on various topics including hy-pergraph colouring and generalised Turán numbers.Next year’s topic is Complex Analysis and I wouldrecommend the conference to anyone who is poten-tially interested in going!

Matthew Coulson receiving his prize

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