Month: July 2019

Next week, Daniel Robertz is presenting his research at the ISSAC 2019 conference in China.

The International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) is the premier conference for research in symbolic computation and computer algebra. ISSAC 2019 will be the 44th meeting in the series, which started in 1966 and has been held annually since 1981. The conference presents a range of invited speakers, tutorials, poster sessions, software demonstrations and vendor exhibits with a center-piece of contributed research papers.

The authors are Vladimir Gerdt and Daniel Robertz and the title is:
Algorithmic approach to strong consistency analysis of finite difference approximations to PDE systems.

This week is the conference for the foundation year network at the University of Sussex. Dr. Matthew Craven (Programme Manager for Foundation Year) is attending the conference to present his joint work with Jenny Sharp: “Combatting the deficit model in Foundation Year Mathematics: ethical admissions and inclusive curricula.”

This week the 28th annual International Laser Physics workshop is running in Korea. There are three speakers from CMS in Plymouth attending: Dr. Suo Tang, Dr. Ben King an Dr. Anton Ilderton.

The taster day was a day when visiting school students (year 12) can visit the University of Plymouth to work on a variety of projects. The students worked on a different projects for 1 hour with different teams of lecturers. The day was organized by Jenny Sharp.

The three activities delivered were:

Activity 1: Proofs in Mathematics – Matthew Craven
Learning mathematics is much easier when it is understood where the results come from. In this workshop, we will look at techniques of proving mathematical formulae and results. We will also look at how NOT to prove these results. Expect to be challenged.

Activity 2: Wave power and wave scour – Dave Simmonds, Pete Arber, Long-yuan Li
Students will be shown around the internationally known COAST wave energy research laboratory, to discover how engineers are working to tackle climate change through the realisation of clean energy production. They will also get their (wet) hands on an experiment in the Coastal basin that seeks to explain and tackle an important engineering problem.

Activity 3: How not to add fractions – Colin Christopher
In this workshop you will investigate sequences of fractions in order of size – Farey Sequences.

Dr Anton Ilderton and Dr Tom Heinzl in Mathematical Science have been awarded by the Leverhulme Trust a two-year research grant, worth GBP 123,000. The grant will finance a postdoctoral researcher to work with them on the topic of “Uncharted regimes of light-matter interactions”. This further cements Plymouth’s place as international leaders in the field of high-intensity laser physics.

The following post was circulated on the faculty newsletter.

Three Statistics MSc students from Zhejiang Gongshang University have visited the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Plymouth. Zhejiang Gongshang University was scored A-­ (top 5% to 10%) for Statistics in the latest China University Subject Rankings (http://www.chinadegrees.cn/xwyyjsjyxx/xkpgjg/2016phden/index.shtml). All three students were funded by their home institution for their research visits to Plymouth for three or four months. One student is working on the statistical analysis for the impact of Brexit on Chinese stock markets, and the other two students are working on different aspects of multi-factor quantitative stock selection models. While this exchange was coordinated by Dr Yinghui Wei , the students are undertaking research projects in statistics in collaboration with various supervisors, including Drs Rana Moyeed, Matthew Craven, Alessandro Cardinali and Yinghui Wei. As a result of the visit, one of the students has submitted his draft paper to the Journal of Systems Science and Complexity (Springer) for publication.

Dr Yinghui Wei

We are happy to announce that the following staff in the Centre of Mathematical Sciences have been promoted to Associate Professor this year

• Dr. Luciana Dalla Valle
• Dr. Ben King
• Dr. Yinghui Wei

Mathematicians and Statisticians are important collaborators in many scientific projects because they often develop methodology that helps the science to happen.

An example of this is a paper published today (1^st July 2019) in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0392-9 in which our Julian Stander, working with palaeontologists from Plymouth, Germany and Norway,developed and implemented statistical methodology that detected a global change in evolution that took place around 170 million years ago that led to one of the most prominent diversifications of marine life in the history of the Earth.  Before the change, evolution was controlled by non-biological factors such as ocean chemistry,while after the change it was controlled by biological factors such as predator-prey relationships.

See the press release and video from the University of Plymouth.

Dr. Jenny Sharp runs many masterclasses in mathematics for school students. At the end of June, there was a 1 day mathematics event run at the University of Plymouth aimed at year 9 students. There were just under 100 students from schools all over Devon and Cornwall and 6 accompanying teachers. The following activities were presented.

Activity 1: Sam Durbin, Royal Institution of Great Britain – How to win – the mathematics of games

Activity 2: Margaret Harding, AMSP – Prime Number Properties

Activity 3: Maths with Education students, Plymouth University – Magic Squares

Activity 4: Luke Cole, Saltash School – How long is a piece of string – Fractal geometry

Activity 5: Suki Honey, Plymouth University – Mathematical Origami

The plenary session was entitled “The Storm of the Century – Using data to anticipate extreme climate events” and the speaker was the RSS William Guy Lecturer for this year.