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INI NEWS BULLETIN
March 2022
Dear friends, associates and supporters of INI,
Welcome to the March 2022 edition of our monthly news bulletin. As April approaches, INI's main Seminar Room is filling to capacity with participants and the days are lengthening beneath azure skies. In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke:
"It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart."
This month, we're promoting: keynote lectures; support initiatives for academics displaced by the war in Ukraine; and a fascinating Cambridge Festival talk. Alongside this, we'll be celebrating award-winning young mathematicians and an Abel-prize winning researcher. Finally, we'll be paying tribute to a brilliant artist whose work continues to inspire visitors to the Institute despite his sad and untimely passing; and giving an update about our travel funding policy.
Thanks as always for your continued support. We are excited to say that the next edition of this bulletin will not only be delivered via different software, but will also have received a considerable visual and editorial overhaul. We hope that it pleases you when it arrives.
Until then.
- INI Communications team
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Contact: communications@newton.ac.uk
(above) Physical participants in the "Modelling and analysis of turbulent transport, mixing and scaling" workshop, 7-11 March 2022
SUPPORT FOR UKRAINE: learn how INI is supporting displaced mathematicians, and how you can help too.
As detailed in our previous email of 11 March, INI has launched two initiatives to support mathematicians displaced by Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. As a reminder:
- To help our fellow mathematicians who have become refugees, we have initiated a Solidarity list to connect those who need help and those who are able to offer it.
- Some researchers in the mathematical sciences can directly be offered help through our special INI research programme Solidarity for mathematicians.
There has been considerable interest in both initiatives so far. Please continue to share these links as widely as possible.
STEM for BRITAIN: early career researchers celebrated in Parliamentary awards ceremony
(above, left to right) medal winners Desislava Ivanova (Oxford), Matthew Tointon (Bristol), Teresa Bautista (KCL).
INI was proud to provide media support to the STEM for BRITAIN awards this month. The poster competition - which is sponsored by the Parliamentary & Scientific Committee and takes place in the House of Commons – is judged by professional and academic experts. It aims to “help politicians understand more about the UK’s thriving science and engineering base" and is open to early stage or early career researchers.
The three winners in the mathematics category – Desislava Ivanova (University of Oxford, Bronze), Teresa Bautista (King’s College London, Silver) and Matthew Tointon (University of Bristol, Gold) – were picked from 20 selected finalists and were awarded cash prizes ranging from £750 to £1,500 in value.
INI would like to congratulate not just Desislava, Teresa and Matthew on their awards, but all 20 of the mathematics finalists, and the further 100 finalists in the Biosciences, Chemistry, Engineering and Physics categories also. The level and passion of research on display was of inspirational quality, and we wish each of them the greatest success in the promising careers which lie ahead.
ROTHSCHILD LECTURE: "Population dynamics and black spots on the Sun" by Stanislav Molchanov (North Carolina) | Tuesday 5 April, 16:00
(above) Professor Stanislav Mochanov (North Carolina)
The Fractional differential equations programme's Rothschild keynote talk will take place on Tuesday 5 April at 16:00 in INI's Seminar Room 1. A synopsis of Professor Stanislav Molchanov's talk follows below. All are welcome to attend.
The goal of the population dynamics theory is to describe the particle systems whose evolution includes a random motion (migration) and the birth-death processes. The theory must explain the visible effects of high irregularity (intermittency), clusterization etc. of the real populations. Mathematically, the problem can be reduced to analysis of the non-linear equations of the KPP (Kolmogorov – Petrovskii – Piskunov) type and the system of corresponding moment equations.
Due to Ya.B. Zeldovich, the magnetic field of the Sun (or hot stars) can be presented phenomenologically as an ensemble of the quasi – particles (closed magnetic loops). Their evolution is similar to the population dynamics and leads to the understanding of the black spots as a manifestation of the intermittency of the magnetic fields. Almost all magnetic energy is concentrated in the spots. These spots cover a very small part of the surface of the Sun.
CAMBRIDGE FESTIVAL: "How do cells walk through complex environments?" by Anotida Madzvamuse | Saturday 9 April, 11:00
(above) Professor Anotida Madzvamuse (Sussex)
This year, INI's contribution to the Cambridge Festival will come via the irrepressible Professor Anotida Madzvamuse (Sussex). Prof Madzvamuse will be delivering his talk "How do cells walk through complex environments?" in INI's main Seminar Room at 11:00 on Saturday 9 April.
At the time of sending, there are a limited number of tickets still available. However these are sure to go quickly - so click the link below immediately if you are able to join us for this fascinating talk!
Known as the smallest biological entity, the cell, is fundamental to life, human or otherwise. Unlike humans, animals and many other living organisms, the cell has no legs, head nor tail, yet cells have a remarkable ability to polarise and exhibit the front and back, associated with human mobility, during migration in complex environments such as in blood, tissue or during disease, such as cancer or during the wound healing process. In this presentation, Prof Anotida Madzvamuse will demonstrate the crucial role of mathematics to help understand how cells walk through complex environments. He will also present current challenges where mathematics has a pivotal role to help lead future discoveries.
Anotida Madzvamuse is Professor of Mathematical and Computational Biology at the University of Sussex. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford (awarded in 2001). His research focuses on the applications of mathematics to experimental, medical and plant sciences. He is also interested in promoting equality, diversity and inclusion in Mathematical Sciences. He has a passion for training a new generation of early career fellows at the interface between mathematics and its applications.
IN MEMORY: a tribute to Grenville Davey, the Turner prize winning sculptor and former INI "artist-in-residence" who died on 28 February.
(above) Grenville Davey, portrait by Josh Wright
The Institute was greatly saddened to learn of the passing of Grenville Davey on 28 February 2022. A previous artist-in-residence at INI, Grenville was a popular and ever-present figure during his tenure and our thoughts are with his friends, family and colleagues at this time.
The following words were submitted by Professor David Berman (Queen Mary University of London) specifically for this newsletter, and form a fitting tribute to Grenville:
"Grenville’s curiosity led him to join the School of Physics at Queen Mary in the position of artist in residence in 2011. There we began working together on works inspired by ideas of duality. This was a natural topic for Grenville, who had spent years pursuing an interest in sculptures that occurred in pairs (or "families") where the presence of one sculpture influenced the understanding of another. He was drawn to the way mathematicians and physicists use visual modes of thinking, and took a particular interest in the idea of duality. Duality was the buzzword for string theory at the time. The idea of having seemingly different spacetime geometries that were secretly (to the string) identical fascinated Grenville.
"When I led the programme Mathematics and Applications of Branes in String and M-theory, at INI in 2012, Grenville was a natural candidate to try something new. And so he was once more brought in as an artist in residence - this time to the INI. We were awarded funding by the Henry Moore Foundation, and Grenville diligently attended many of the activities. He experienced love at first sight when he first encountered the omnipresent blackboards (something else he had in common with mathematicians). Together we worked on a variety of pieces, and Grenville produced some wooden works that still remain in the INI. More than this though, he contributed to the atmosphere of the programme as a sympathetic outsider. Although he was not involved in the mathematics, he was highly supportive of its goals and ideas. He felt his work resonated with mathematical notions of symmetry, beauty and simplicity, and of the role of relations between things rather than things in themselves. He will be missed."
ABEL PRIZE: Dennis Sullivan receives 2022 award for "groundbreaking contributions to topology".
(above) Dennis Sullivan (Stony Brook)
Many congratulations are due to Professor Dennis Parnell Sullivan, who was this month awarded the 2022 Abel Prize for his “groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects”.
The prize, established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2002, is one of the most prestigious in mathematics and comes with a 7.5m Kroner (~£659,000) cash award. An extract of the Abel Committee's citation follows below:
Dennis Sullivan has repeatedly changed the landscape of topology by introducing new concepts, proving landmark theorems, answering old conjectures and formulating new problems that have driven the field forwards. He has moved from area to area, seemingly effortlessly, using algebraic, analytic and geometric ideas like a true virtuoso.
His early work was on the classification of manifolds – spaces which cannot be distinguished from Euclidean flat space in the small, but which globally are different (for example, the surface of a sphere is, in the small, roughly a plane). Building on the work of William Browder and Sergei Novikov, he developed an algebraic topological perspective on this problem and invented some brilliant techniques to solve the problems that arise. This included the ideas of “localisation of a space at a prime” and “completion of a space at a prime”. These are ideas exported from pure algebra that provide a new language for expressing geometric phenomena, which have become tools for resolving multitudes of other problems. Nowadays it is commonplace to work at one prime at a time, using different methods for different primes.
Another of Sullivan’s breakthroughs was the study of what is left when all the primes are ignored – known as rational homotopy theory. He and Daniel Quillen gave two different complete algebraic descriptions of what is left from a space in this setting. Sullivan’s model is based on differential forms – a concept of multivariable calculus, enabling direct connection to geometry and analysis. This made a major part of algebraic topology suitable for calculation, and has proven revolutionary. The use of differential forms made it especially relevant to algebraic geometry in combination with Hodge theory, as is shown in Sullivan’s work with Pierre Deligne, Phillip Griffiths and John Morgan.
PARTICIPANT FUNDING: an update to our travel support policy
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, INI has so far this year offered full travel funding to all academic visitors to the Institute. However, as the recovery has accelerated and visitor numbers are expected to exceed pre-2020 levels, we are now phasing out this support in order to better allocate resources to those most in need.
Extensive funding support is still available to those in need of childcare during their stay, to those with a disability, and to visitors from DAC-listed countries.
