On 14 June 2022 Maths Prizes Day took place in Petwood Hotel in Woodhall Spa. On arrival staff and students had tea and coffee, took a tour of the magnificent park premises, and enjoyed the lunch with sparkling wine. The ceremonies began with flowers presented to long-serving member of staff Dr Manuela Mura and to School administration officers Bridgitte Whitaker, Samantha Jones, Debra Brown. Then the Boole Prize 2022 was given to Aidan Mcpolland for the best performance in Year 2.  Other prizes and commendations for outstanding results in maths will be presented at the beginning of the new academic year. (Prizes for Y3 students are postponed until graduation in September.) Prizes and commendations to students for academic achievements are supplemented with Amazon vouchers.

The celebration continued with the group photo, walks, socializing and relaxation in the park. The place is of great historic interest, served as home…

Congratulations to our Year 4 Maths Masters student Thomas Smith with getting a PhD position at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf! Building on excellent result of his mathematics studies in Lincoln, including the 2021 summer UROS research project “Engel conditions in branch groups” under supervision of Dr Anitha Thillaisundaram, Thomas made further progress in his year 4 studies, which in the 2nd semester amounts to a massive quadruple module of Masters research project. His successful application for PhD studies in Düsseldorf means that in September of 2022 he will start working on his PhD thesis under supervision of Prof. Benjamin Klopsch, Head of the Algebra and Number Theory group at the HHU Düsseldorf, in the research area of Asymptotic and Geometric Group Theory. Well done, Thomas, and best wishes in your further studies and research!

Congratulations to the winners of the Lincoln Mathematics Challenge 2021-22 and a big thank you to all participants! A strong competition made the choices difficult for the Competition Committee, with often suble differences in the proofs determining each place winners.

Solutions of the problems can be found here.

The results of the competition are:

1st prize winner:

Ned Bowlas (Harrogate Grammar School).

Joint 2nd prize winners:

Ben Chung (Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge);

Julia Volovich (Chesterton Community College, Cambridge).

Joint 3rd place winners:

Tessa Hayhurst (Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge);

Jiayi Meng (The King’s School, Grantham);

Louis Molenaar (Dereham Sixth Form College, Norfolk).

C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S !

To keep our Mathematics and Physics programmes relevant to the key industries that our graduates will one day end up in, we invite industry speakers to give special lectures on how they use mathematics and physics in their job. Our modules “Industrial and Financial Mathematics” and “Industrial and Econophysics” aim to expose students to some of the many ways in which physics and mathematics is used to solve “real world” problems. The modules are intended to showcase some of the industrial applications of physics and mathematics with a focus on the finance sector towards the end. Invited industry specialists give the lectures for the industrial, introducing mathematical techniques and physics they have not encountered before. Unlike traditional modules where content is delivered and then assessed, the industrial modules focuses on the ability to self teach complex and unfamiliar mathematics and physics. This simulates a more realistic approach to solving a…

In the university-wide Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme (UROS), the in 2021 are students of School of Mathematics and Physics:

Roksana Kulengowska, with project “Calculating the Hill Sphere of Known Exoplanets: Which Exoplanets Could Host Moon Systems?“, under supervision of Dr Phil Sutton, and

Christopher Denison, with project “Lamellar Block Copolymers Under Shear Flow“, under supervision of Dr Marco Pinna & Dr Javier Diaz.

These wins continue the successful participation of our students in previous years: in 2020 one of the two runners-up for People’s Choice Award was

Henry Macpherson, with project “Mathematical modelling of polymer capsules“, under supervision of Dr Martin Greenall (https://staffnews.lincoln.ac.uk/2020/11/30/uros-award-winners/)

The 2021 winners were announced at the on-campus UROS Celebration event on the 11th November, in Skal Tipi:

This month the summer festival of learning is organized by the University and the Student’s Union. See https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/studentlife/summerfestival/. Also our school has organized various fun and interesting activities, online and face-to-face. Feel free to attend as many as possible.

• Physics outreach workshop by IOP

17 June 2021, 10:00 – 12:00

The session aims to Learn how to do Physics outreach in schools. This is for students in the School of Mathematics and Physics

Benefits: 1) Unusual view on physics which we all know.2) Developing self confidence in oral communication.3) Engaging with IOP
Access link:
https://lncn.ac/iop-outreach for a direct link to the BB collaborate event
https://lncn.ac/iop-outr-reg for registration so that we are aware of the numbers

• UK Fusion CDT Webinar

17 June 2021, 12:00 – 13:00

This session aims to introduce the Fusion CDT and what it’s like being a PhD student. PhD students from the Fusion CDT will outline…

Thomas Smith, a third-year mathematics student, successfully obtained a UROS bursary to work on a summer project on branch groups with Anitha Thillaisundaram. This project involves establishing and investigating certain commutator relations for explicit branch groups.

On the evening Friday the 5th of March 2021, the School of Maths and Physics hosted its first virtual movie night. We watched the BBC documentary on Fermat’s Last Theorem and Andrew Wiles.

On Wednesday the 24th of February 2021, Anitha Thillaisundaram gave an outreach talk on “Hausdorff dimension, fractals and the coastline paradox”, which included a brief mention on her research on Hausdorff dimensions in groups, to sixth form students at Lincolnshire’s Franklin College.