THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER
Forthcoming
Society
Meetings
2005
Friday 8 July
York
Northern Regional
Meeting
O. Horodecki
C. Bennett[page 3]
Monday 5 September
BristolSouth West & South
Wales Regional
Meeting
T. TaoV. Bergelson
Friday 7 October
LondonAlgorithms Meeting
M. Dyer
M. Jerrum

No. 339 July 2005

LMS PRIZES 2005
PÓLYA PRIZE
PROFESSOR SIR MICHAEL BERRY,FRS, of the University of Bristol isawarded the Pólya Prize in recognition of his many profound andhighly innovative contributions
to diverse areas of mathematics
and mathematical physics.
He has made fundamental
contributions and stimulated
research in many directions,especially in optics, wave theory,
quantum chaology, quantum
mechanics and the Berry phase,
asymptotics and the distributionof the zeros of the Riemannzeta function. He has identified
and utilised inter-relationships
between these areas in many
beautiful ways. His exposition ofscience and mathematics in articles and lectures is inspirational
both to specialists and to thegeneral public.

SENIOR WHITEHEAD PRIZE
Friday 18 November
LondonAnnual General
Meeting
F.C. Kirwan
B. Totaro

PROFESSOR KEITH MOFFATT,
FRS, of the University ofCambridge is awarded the
Senior Whitehead Prize for his
outstanding contributions toapplied mathematics, especiallyin the field of theoretical fluid
mechanics. He is also honoured
for his substantial and long-lasting influence on, and service to,
the UK mathematics community.
Keith Moffatt’s contributions

to mathematical research havebeen profound and manifold,ranging from low Reynolds
number flows at small scales,through turbulence modelling,
to astrophysical fluid mechanics
on the very large. He is also a
dedicated and most effective
teacher and lecturer, and he has
given much time and energy
over his career to national andinternational
administrative
duties, including the roles of
Director of the Isaac Newton
Institute for Mathematical
Sciences(1996-2001)
andPresident of the International
Union of Theoretical andApplied Mechanics (2000-2004).

BERWICK PRIZE
DR IAIN GORDON of Glasgow
University is awarded the Berwick
Prize for his paper ‘Baby Vermamodules for rational Cherednik
algebras’, published in the
Bulletin of the LMS 35 (2003),
321-336. This is a powerful contribution to the theory of symplectic reflection algebras, made byadapting techniques fundamental to the representation theoryof Lie algebras in positive characteristic. The paper’s new idea
brought dramatic immediate success, answering many importantquestions of Etingof and
Ginzburg, and the methods havethe potential for much further
progress.

1

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTERWHITEHEAD PRIZES

2PROFESSOR BEN GREEN of the University ofBristol is awarded a Whitehead Prize for hisbreakthrough results in combinatorics andcombinatorial number theory. Much of his
work is motivated by the general problem offinding arithmetic structures in particular
sets. His results include an improvement ofBourgain's estimate of the size of arithmetic
progressions in sumsets, a proof of the
Cameron-Erdös conjecture on sum-free setsof natural numbers, and, following his proof
that every set of primes of positive relative
upper density contains an arithmetic progression of length three, a recent spectacular theorem with Terence Tao that the primes contain arbitrarily large arithmetic progressions.
DR BERND KIRCHHEIM of the University of
Oxford is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his
fundamental work in several areas of real
analysis. His results in geometric measure
theory include a proof that rectifiable metricspaces have density one, a metric differentiation theorem, and a surprisingly powerfulextension with Ambrosio of the FedererFleming theory of currents to general metricspaces. His results in the calculus of variations

No. 339 July 2005

include a proof that the quasiconvex envelope of a continuously differentiable function remains continuously differentiable anda complete solution to the problem of existence of non-trivial Lipschitz self-maps of theplane whose gradients attain only finitely
many values.
PROFESSOR NEIL STRICKLAND of the
University of Sheffield is awarded aWhitehead Prize for his contributions toalgebraic topology. He is an outstanding
algebraic topologist, who has contributed
significantly to most areas of the subject. His
main achievements have been in developing
and extending the use of the methods of thetheory of formal groups in homotopy theory,and especially in applying them to study
elliptic cohomology theories.
DR PETER TOPPING of the University of
Warwick is awarded a Whitehead Prize forhis work on non-linear partial differential
equations in geometric analysis. He has madeespecially important progress in the study of
singular behaviour of the harmonic map heatflow in two spatial dimensions by showingthat the singular behaviour is unique in great
generality and constructing new solutions

LMS Newsletter
General Editor: Dr D.R.J. Chillingworth (D.R.J.Chillingworth@maths.soton.ac.uk)
Reports Editor: Dr S.A. Huggett (s.huggett@plymouth.ac.uk)
Reviews Editor: Professor M.P.F. du Sautoy (dusautoy@maths.ox.ac.uk)
Administrative Editor: Miss S.M. Oakes (oakes@lms.ac.uk)
Editorial office address: London Mathematical Society, De Morgan House,
57-58 Russell Square, London WC1B 4HS (tel: 020 7637 3686; fax: 020 7323 3655;
email: oakes@lms.ac.uk, web: www.lms.ac.uk)
Designed by CHP Design (tel: 020 7240 0466, email: info@chpdesign.com, web:www.chpdesign.com)
Publication dates and deadlines: published monthly, except August.
Items and advertisements by first day of the month prior to publication.
Information in the Newsletter is free to be used elsewhere unless otherwise stated; attribution isrequested when reproducing whole articles. The LMS cannot accept responsibility for the accuracyof information in the Newsletter. Views expressed do not necessarily represent the views or policyof the London Mathematical Society.
Charity registration number: 252660.

permitting full understanding of the significance of the condition of monotonicity ofenergy in the previous existence and uniqueness results. He proved the first results on
exponential rates of convergence for the harmonic heat flow in the presence of singularities at infinity.

FELLOWS OF THE
ROYAL SOCIETY
Amongst those elected to Fellowship of theRoyal Society in May 2005 were: Professor
Martin Barlow (University of British Columbia),
Professor David Masser (Universität Basel),Professor Nicholas Trefethen (University of
Oxford), Professor Richard Ward (University ofDurham). Professor Raoul Bott (Harvard
University) was elected a Foreign Member.

CECIL KING TRAVELSCHOLARSHIP AWARD
The 2005 Cecil King
TravelScholarshiphas been awarded toAlexander Paulin, a
PhD
student
at
Imperial College. The
London Mathematical Society makes theaward of up £5,000
annually to a young
mathematicianofoutstanding promise,to support a period of study or researchabroad for a typical period of three months.
Alexander will use the Scholarship to fund atrip to Harvard in early 2006, during a period
when world experts in p-adic modular forms
will be working together, including his PhD
supervisor Professor Kevin Buzzard. In keeping with the recent emergence of a p-adic
Langlands program, he hopes to investigate
the geometry and representation theory ofvarious p-adic automorphic forms.

SIR EDWARD MAITLAND
WRIGHT (1906 – 2005)
Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Aberdeen (1962-76) andProfessor of Mathematics (1935-62). Memberof the London Mathematical Society 19292005.
A Memorial Service for Sir Edward
Maitland Wright MA, DPhil, LLD, DSc, FRSE
who died on 2 February 2005 will be held inKing’s College Chapel, University ofAberdeen at 3.00 pm on Friday 7 October
2005. All friends and colleagues are invited
both to the service and the subsequent
reception; please be seated in the Chapel by
2.45 pm. Contact Mrs Debra Buchan on 01224
272689 or email d.buchan@abdn.ac.uk if you
wish to attend.

NEWS FROM ACMEThe Advisory Committee on Mathematics
Education’s (ACME) feasibility study on
ensuring a high quality ‘local offer’ inContinuing Professional Development inmathematics, as part of the planned establishment of the National Centre for
Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics(NCETM), has now come to an end. A final
report has been submitted to DfES and it isexpected that it will be published soon. See:www.royalsoc.ac.uk/acme/mathsteaching.htm
for further details.
A summary of the key themes raised at the
QCA/ACME workshop on functional mathematics, held on 3 March 2005, is available on
the ACME website. ACME is continuing torepresent the views of the mathematics community on the QCA Post14 Mathematics
Advisory Group. See: www.royalsoc.ac.uk/
acme/post14.htm.
Notes on past meetings of ACME anddetails of future meetings can be found at:www.royalsoc.ac.uk/acme/whatsHappening.
htm.

3THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

NEWS FROM THE
INTERNATIONAL
MATHEMATICAL UNION
African Mathematical Union
Issue 30 of the Newsletter of the African
Mathematical Union Commission on the
History of Mathematics in Africa (AMUCHMA) has appeared. This issue contains a(first) list of over 600 examples of African
doctorates in mathematics, mathematics
education and the history of mathematics.
AMUCHMA webpage: www.math.buffalo.
edu/mad/AMU/amuchma_online.html.

IMU on the web
4

In mid-April, the MSRI at Berkeley held aworkshop on digitizing the mathematical literature. A model instance of what 'retronumerisation' (that's franglais) can create is
instanced by the work at Grenoble, see
www.numdam.org.
The IMU's vision of a World Digital
Mathematics Library is partly encapsulatedby the draft statement at www.ceic.
math.ca/News/IMUonWeb.shtml#CEIC8.
I hope soon to be able to use IMU on the
web to provide you with the agreed
endorsed IMU statement better summarising the goals of the project. The greatest
inhibition to the vision of retrodigitizing
all the old literature sadly is that of copyright. In that context, http://aaupnet.
org/aboutup/issues/0865_001.pdf makes
fascinating reading. Where do you (as likely both writer and reader) stand on thesematters?
The greatest benefit of digitization isready immediate access; see the interestingnews at www.nature.com/nature/focus/access
debate/17.html and no: because of copyrightreasons I cannot guarantee that that URL is alasting one.
Alf van der Poorten
on behalf of the CEIC

No. 339 July 2005

KHACHIYAN AND DANTZIG
Mathematics interfaces with the real world in
more ways than most of us realize. Many
products and services which have a ‘mathematical ingredient’, i.e. mathematical modelling, mathematical simulation, or the application of mathematical software have been utilized in the design and/or production process.
In economic terms, mathematics has becomea production factor.
One of the great achievements of the 20th
century in this respect was the invention anddevelopment of linear programming (and its
subsequent extensions to nonlinear, integer,
and stochastic programming). Whenever you
fly an airplane, ride a public bus, make aphone call, buy sausages or gasoline , receive
a letter, or try to get a loan, somewhere in
the supply chain some linear programs will
have been solved. Today, there is excellent
commercial (and even open source) software
available that can handle linear programswith millions of variables and constraints.
The economic impact of linear programming
was honoured with a Nobel Prize awarded to
L.V. Kantorovich and T.C. Koopmans in 1975.
The mathematical foundation of linear programming was laid in 1947 by George B.
Dantzig with the invention of the Simplex
Method. Optimizers view Dantzig as the‘father of linear programming’. It remains an
open problem to this day as to whether there
exists a polynomial time version of the Simplex
Method. In 1979 Leonid G. Khachiyan
employed, in a very surprising way, the Ellipsoid
Method to prove that linear programs can besolved in polynomial time, a result that has triggered intensified interest in LP algorithms.
These two leading figures of optimization
passed away within the couple of months.
Leonid Khachiyan died on 29 April, aged 52,
and George Dantzig on 13 May, aged 90.
They both will be remembered forever for
their contributions to optimization theory
and practice.

LONDON MATHEMATICAL SOCIETYNORTHERN REGIONAL MEETING
Room B002, Biology Building, University of York
Friday 8 July 2005

2.00 pm LMS business meeting
2.15 pm Pawel Horodecki (Gdansk)
Quantum communication and entanglement:
selected phenomena and open problems
3.15 pm Tea
3.45 pm Charles Bennett (IBM)
Information is quantum (provisional)
5.00 pm Open discussion on the LMS-IMA
Frameworks Study Initiative

There are limited funds available to contribute in part tothe expenses of members of the Society or research students
to attend the Society meeting on Friday 8 July. Requests forsupport, including an estimate of expenses, may be addressedto the Programme Secretary at the Society (web: www.lms.ac.uk;
email: grants@lms.ac.uk).
A dinner preceding the meeting will be held on Thursday 7 July.
Contact the conference organiser Tony Sudbery (as2@york.ac.uk)
if you wish to attend the dinner.
The meeting will be preceded by a workshop on Quantum
Information Theory, from 6-8 July.

5

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTERFERRAN SUNYER IBALAGUER PRIZE 2006

6

Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer (1912-1967) was aself-taught Catalan mathematician who, in
spite of a serious physical disability, was very
active in research in classical Mathematical
Analysis, an area in which he acquired international recognition. Each year in honour ofthe memory of Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer, theFundació Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer awards aninternational mathematical research prize
bearing his name, open to all mathematicians. This prize was awarded for the firsttime in April 1993.
Conditions of the prize
The prize will be awarded for a mathematicalmonograph of an expository nature presenting the latest developments in an active areaof research in Mathematics, in which theapplicant has made important contributions.
The monograph must be original, written in
English, and of at least 150 pages. The monograph must not be subject to any previous
copyright agreement. In exceptional cases,
manuscripts in other languages may be considered. The prize, amounting to 12,000, isprovided by the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer
Foundation. The winning monograph will be
published in Birkhäuser Verlag’s series‘Progress in Mathematics’, subject to the usual
regulations concerning copyright and author’s
rights. The submission of a monograph implies
the acceptance of all of the above conditions.
The name of the prize-winner will beannounced in Barcelona in April 2006.
Scientific committee
The winner of the prize will be proposed by
the Scientific Committee:• A. Córdoba (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)• P. Malliavin (Université de Paris VI)• J. Oesterlé (Institut de Mathématiques deJussieu)• O. Serra (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)• A. Weinstein (University of California at
Berkeley).

No. 339 July 2005

Submission
Monographs should preferably be typeset in TeX.
Authors should send a hard copy of the manuscript and a disk with the DVI and PS (PostScript)
files enclosing an accompanying letter to the
Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Foundation. Submissions
should be sent by 2 December 2005, to Fundació
Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer, Carrer del Carme 47,
E-08001 Barcelona, Spain (ffsb@crm.es).
Recent winners• Antonio Ambrosetti and Andrea Malchiodi
Perturbation methods and semilinear elliptic problems on R n (2005)• José Seade On the topology of isolated singularities in analytic spaces (2005)• Guy David Singular sets of minimizers for
the Mumford-Shah functional (2004)• F. Andreu-Vaillo, V. Casellas and J.M.
Mazón Parabolic quasilinear equations minimizing linear growth functionals (2003)• André Unterberger Automorphic pseudodifferential analysis and higher-level Weyl
calculi (2002)• Alexander Lubotzky and Dan Segal
Subgroup growth (2002)• Martin Golubitsky and Ian Stewart The
symmetry perspective (2001)• Juan-Pablo Ortega and Tudor Ratiu
Hamiltonian singular reduction (2000)

NEVILLE MELFIDr Neville A. Melfi, who was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 8
May 1981, died on 23 February 2005.

MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
OF JAPAN
Professor Sadayoshi Kojima was elected as
President of the Mathematical Society of Japan,
as the successor of Professor Yasuo Morita. The
London Mathematical Society has a reciprocity
agreement with the Mathematical Society ofJapan (34-8 Taito 1-chome, Taito-ku, Tokyo 1100016 Japan; tel: 03 3835 3483, fax 03 3835 3485).

7

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTERIMA–LMS FRAMEWORKSSTUDY INITIATIVEThe Councils are keen to receive comments on the issues in the Frameworks
Report. Send your views by email to:
fsi@ima.org.uk or fsi@lms.ac.uk

8

Further Open Meetings planned:• 8 July (York) – 5.00 pm, Room B002,
Biology Building, University of York,as part of the LMS Northern Regional
Meeting• 5 September (Bristol) – 5.00 pm,
School of Mathematics, Universityof Bristol, as part of the LMS
South-West and South Wales
Regional Meeting• 13 September (Glasgow) – 6.30 pm,
Lecture Theatre A005, Glasgow
Caledonian University following the
IMA Scottish Branch Annual Schools
Day (details to be confirmed)• 20 September (London) 4.00 pm,
De Morgan House• 27 September (Manchester) as partof the IMA Lancashire and NW
Branch meeting (further details
to be confirmed)

BOLOGNA PROCESS
Bergen Meeting
Ministers from forty or so European countries
met in Bergen in May (www.bolognabergen2005.no) to take forward the Bologna
process, which seeks to establish common
degree names and some measure of compatibility between those degrees in the countries involved. This has meant major changes
for many of our European colleagues, butvery little, so far, for UK mathematicians.
The meeting in Bergen reinforces this general picture. Doctoral programmes are now

No. 339 July 2005

included, but the model for these is one towhich UK practice largely conforms. Various
matters have been hotly debated in the run
up to the meeting, but the outcomes seem,at least to me, to be sensible. For instance,
PhD programmes should take 3-4 years, fulltime equivalent; mobility of doctoral students is encouraged but programmes are notbroken down into credit-bearing parts; diversity of practice is recognised.
For undergraduate programmes, attempts
to encourage, or even impose, common syllabuses seem to have been kicked into thelong grass. The proposed overarching qualifications framework is mostly harmless and isfirmly subject-based. We still have a problem
about fitting undergraduate Masters degrees
into the Bologna scheme, but so do other scientific and engineering disciplines.
David Salinger

VISIT OF PROFESSOR
M. FELLOWS
Professor Michael Fellows (University of
Newcastle, Australia) is visiting the UK during
June and July. His visit is partially supported
by an LMS Scheme 2 grant. At 12 noon on
10 July he will give a lecture titled Fixedparameter tractability is polynomial-time
extremal structure theory as part of the
Algorithms and Complexity in Durham 2005
Workshop (www.dur.ac.uk/acid.2005). People
not attending the workshop can attend thistalk without any charge. It will take place atCollingwood College, South Road, Durham
DH1 3LT. The talk is scheduled at the very endof the workshop to enable the attendance ofmathematicians who attend the British
Combinatorial Conference. The BCC takes
place in Durham and starts on 10 July
(http://mcs.open.ac.uk/bcc2005). For further
information
contact
StefanSzeider,
Department of Computer Science, Durham
University (tel: 0191 3341 759, email
stefan.szeider@durham.ac.uk).

LONDON MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
SOUTH WEST & SOUTH WALESREGIONAL MEETING
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
Monday 5 September 2005
2.00 pm LMS business meeting
2.15 pm Vitaly Bergelson (Ohio State)
Ergodic Ramsey Theory and properties of large sets
3.15 pm Tea
4.00 pm Terence Tao (UCLA)
Ergodic theory, arithmetic progressions and the primes
5.00 pm Open discussion on the LMS-IMA
Frameworks Study Initiative
There will be a reception and dinner afterwards. For further details
and to reserve a place at the dinner, contact Cathy Badley(Cathy.Badley@bristol.ac.uk).
There are limited funds available to contribute in part to the expenses
of members of the Society or research students to attend the Society
meeting on Monday 5 September. Requests for support, including an
estimate of expenses, may be addressed to the Programme Secretary
at the Society (web: www.lms.ac.uk; email: grants@lms.ac.uk).
This will be followed by a workshop on Additive Combinatorics,
focusing on recent developments concerning arithmetic progressions,
5 – 9 September. The interplay between ergodic theory and combinatorics/
harmonic analysis will be a particular focus of the workshop.
Further information is on the web at:
www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~mabjg/bristolworkshop.html
or contact the organizer Ben Green, School of Mathematics, Universityof Bristol (B.J.Green@bristol.ac.uk).

9

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

No. 339 July 2005

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGEFACULTY OF MATHEMATICSADAMS PRIZE
Mathematical Biology
The Chairman of the Adjudicators for the Adams Prize invites applications. The Prize will be awarded this year for research achievement in
the field of Mathematical Biology, interpreted in the broadest sense.

10

The prize is open to any person who, on 31 October 2005, will holdan appointment in the UK, either in a university or in some otherinstitution; and who is under 40 (in exceptional circumstances the
Adjudicators may relax this age limit). The value of the prize is
expected to be approximately £15,000; of which one third is awarded
to the prize-winner on announcement of the prize, one third isprovided to the prize-winner’s institution (for research expenses ofthe prize-winner) and one third is awarded to the prize-winner on
acceptance for publication in an internationally recognised journalof a substantial (normally at least 25 printed pages) original article,of which the prize-winner is an author, surveying a significant partof the winner’s field.
Applications (seven copies), comprising a CV, a list of publications,
the work or works (published or unpublished) to be considered, anda brief non-technical summary of the most significant new results ofthese works (designed for mathematicians not working in the subjectarea) should be sent to:
The Secretary of the Adams Prize Adjudicators,
Faculty Office, Centre for Mathematical Sciences,
Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WA(enquiries may be emailed to: faculty@maths.cam.ac.uk).
The deadline for receipt of applications is 31 October 2005.

LMS PROGRAMME AND
CONFERENCE FUND

after, the event for which the grant is made.
Please send all applications in hard copy to
the Programme Secretary at De Morgan House.

The Programme and Conference Fund is used
to give financial support for mathematicalresearch in the UK. The fund is administeredby the LMS Programme Committee, which
distributes as grants some of the funds that
the Society receives from its investments andpublishing activities. This is one of the mechanisms through which the Society achieves its
central purpose, namely to ‘promote andextend mathematical knowledge’. The
Society operates as a charity and does notreceive any public funding. Thus ProgrammeCommittee has different opportunities andworks within a different regulatory framework from other funding bodies, such as the
EPSRC. Grants are made under six schemes
which are described on the LMS website(www.lms.ac.uk/activities/prog_com/index.html).
Please note that Programme Committee's
budget is under pressure, and we are notalways able to make awards as fully as wewould like.

Who may apply

How to apply
For Schemes 1-5 application forms may beobtained from the Society’s Office or may be
downloaded as rich text files from the LMS
website (www.lms.ac.uk/activities/prog_com/
index.html). For Scheme 6 applications
should be made by letter.
Applications should be set out clearly, andpreferably typed. They should be self-contained; please do not append substantial
documents that contain irrelevant detail orrefer to websites for key information. Wherea CV is requested it should be no more than
two sides of A4.
Grants must be claimed in a specified financial
year
from
1
Septemberto
31 August. Please ensure that you state inyour application in which year you intend toclaim the grant, bearing in mind that grants
should normally be claimed not earlier than
3 months before, and not later than 3 months

Any mathematician working in the UK is eligible to apply for a grant, but if the applicant
is not a member then the application must be
countersigned by an LMS member.

When to apply
Please note that applications will not be considered between mid-June and midSeptember. The main meetings of theCommittee are held in February and
September. Additional meetings are held in
between, but time at these is very limited
and it cannot be guaranteed that your application will be considered. For the date of thenext meeting please contact Sylvia Daly
(grants@lms.ac.uk), but above all please notethat some of the individual schemes havetheir own deadlines: these are detailed under
the headings for each scheme.

AssistanceQueries regarding applications can beaddressed to the Programme Secretary,
Stephen Huggett (tel: 01752 232710, email:s.huggett@plymouth.ac.uk) or Sylvia Daly
(tel: 020 7291 9971 email: grants@lms.ac.uk),
who will be pleased to discuss proposals
informally with potential applicants and give
advice on the submission of an application.

Notes for GuidanceApplicants should keep in mind the following
points:1. The Society does not like to receive
sequential applications for grants to support the same or closely related events,
and will not allow its limits for individual
schemes to be exceeded by artificiallysub-dividing an application into a number of separate requests under different
headings.
2. The committee does not normally meetthe full cost of an activity. Rather it aims
to give added value to an event largely
funded by other means, or to bridge the11THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

No. 339 July 2005

gap between cost and the resources thatmight reasonably be made available by auniversity department.
The grants do not cover departmental
overheads. The committee will generally
not allow items such as secretarial costs,
which could be seen as part of normal
departmental provision, or entertainment.
Applicants should note that our mileagerate is 23p.
Each of the schemes has a particular aim aswell as its own financial limits. It is helpful
if applicants consider carefully how their
proposal fits the particular scheme in question, and its detailed rules (which change
from time to time). Thus the academic justification for a Scheme 2 grant should
focus on the benefit to UK mathematics
that the proposed visit would bring, whilethat for a Scheme 5 grant should focus on
the benefits in the Scheme 5 country. In
neither case should it be assumed that thedistinction of the visitor renders further
justification unnecessary.
The committee is made up of mathematicians with a wide spread of research interests, but it should not be assumed thatthey are familiar with the technical detailsof any particular area of mathematics.
Proposals are judged by the committee

itself: although it may seek advice, it does
not normally send proposals to referees. It
is therefore important that the case for a
grant should be written for the generalmathematician and not for the specialist.
7. The committee judges each application
on its merits. Since its membershipchanges from year to year, it should not
be assumed that it is familiar with thedetails of previous applications and correspondence from earlier rounds; norshould it be assumed that a grant, forexample under Scheme 3 or for a regularcollaboration under Scheme 4, will berenewed repeatedly.
8. The limits mentioned in the various schemes
are upper bounds, not standard awards.
Grants are made to meet actual expenditure on items in the application, and any
surplus must be returned to the Society,rather than retained for related purposes or
carried forward to another year.
9. The task of collating applications, forwarding them to the committee, recording decisions, and preparing and checking notification letters is nontrivial andtime-consuming. Please apply well inadvance and bear in mind that you may
not hear the outcome of an application
immediately.

Scheme 1 (cont’d)Applicant

Title

Grant

C. Gundlach

New Directions in Numerical Relativity(INI Satellite Meeting)£3,330M. Mathieu

Belfast Functional Analysis Day 2005

£815

Y.V. Kurylev

Workshop on Applied Inverse Problems 2005

£1,940K. Chen

5th UK Conference on Boundary Integral Methods£2,000N. Heuer

BICOM Workshop on Boundary Elements£3,640

I. Gordon

Scottish Algebra Day£1,460

M. Ruzhansky

Fourier Analysis and Hyperbolic PDEs

£4,000D.M. Evans

Workshop on Pure Model Theory£2,000S. Dantchev

Algorithms and Complexity in Durham£1,860M. Marletta

Mathematical Software in Applied Mathematics£1,585

G.W. Roberts

The University of Wales Gregynog Mathematics
Colloquium£1,835

A. Gorban

Model Reduction and Coarse-Graining Approaches forMultiscale Phenomena£2,000P. Welch

British Logic Colloquium 2005

£2,800K. Goda7th Annual Postgraduate Group Theory Conference£2,507

C.M. Campbell
E.F. Robertson

Groups St Andrews 2005

£3,000Grants awarded from November 2004 to May 2005
Scheme 1

A. Fring

9th Annual UK Meeting on Integrable Models,Conformal Field Theory and Related Topics£2,310

3.

4.
5.

12

6.

Applicant

Title

Grant

M.J. Grannell

20th British Combinatorial Conference£1,000Scheme 2

M.R.E. Proctor

Turbulence, Twist and Treacle: A meeting in celebrationof the 70th birthday of H.K. Moffatt£4,000ApplicantVisitor

To Visit

Grant

A. Premet

Y. Bahturin

Manchester, Leicester, Oxford£1,200A.Y. Lazarev

20th British Topology Meeting£3,600A.W. Mason

P. Zalesskii

Glasgow, Manchester, QMUL

£1,200N.J. Young
Z.A. Lykova

BMC 2006£10,000
A.B. Piunovskiy

E.A. Feinberg

Bristol, Cambridge, Liverpool£1,150A.J.W. Hilton

Reading One-Day Combinatorics Colloquium

E.V. Ferapontov

M. Pavlov

Loughborough, Leeds,
Imperial College£1,100£460

cont’d13

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

No. 339 July 2005

Scheme 2 (cont’d)

14

Scheme 2 (cont’d)ApplicantVisitor

To Visit

Grant

ApplicantVisitor

To Visit

Grant

K.R. Khusnutdinova

A. M. Samsonov

Leeds, Keele, Loughborough£1,050D.G. Larman

K. Swanepoel£515

C. Series

R. Kellerhals

Durham, Warwick, Southampton£850

Oxford, University College London,
Cambridge

J.H. Conway

Cambridge, Birmingham, Warwick,Oxford£545

J.P. Wang

J.A. Sanders

Lancaster, Leeds, Kent

£950

J. Saxl

M. Nazarov

D. Lebedev

York, Loughborough, Durham

J.P.C. Greenlees

S.B. Iyengar

Sheffield, Leicester, Leeds£968

S. Bullett

R.L. Devaney

QMUL, Warwick, Open

£1,200£1,200R.H.J. Grimshaw

E.N. Pelinovsky,
T. Talipova

Loughborough, Sheffield, Hull

C.A. Beck

E. Cohen

QMUL, Bristol, Manchester

Z. Qian

M. Ledoux

Imperial College, Warwick, Oxford,
Cambridge

J. Schröer

J. Xiao

Leeds, York, Manchester

E.B. Davies

B. SimonCambridge, Swansea, London£1,124

A.P. Veselov

V. Adler

Loughborough, Leeds, Imperial College£1,100H.G. Dales

A.Y. Helemskii

Leeds, University College London,
Southampton

P.M. Sutcliffe

M. Paranjape

Kent, Cambridge, Durham£1,170V.B. Kuznetsov

I.V. KomarovYork, Leeds, Loughborough£1,000S. Szeider

M.R. Fellows

Royal Holloway, Oxford, Durham£1,200S.E. Rees

A. Martino

Newcastle, Heriot-Watt, Glasgow£847

A. Mikhailov

G. Shabat

Leeds, Loughborough, Southampton

J-L. Wu

J-A. Yan

C.J. Read
N.J. Laustsen£740£1,000£1,000Scheme 3
ApplicantInstitution

Title

Grant

R. Hoyle

SurreyPatterns, Nonlinear Dynamics andApplications (PANDA).
Amended Award.

£1,200

£700

£850

15

T. Brzezinski

Swansea

QMW-Swansea-Warwick joint researchgroup: Quantum Geometry of Hopf
Algebras and Hopf Algebroids£900

S.D. Galbraith

Royal Holloway

SECANTS£600

I. Gordon

Glasgow

Algebra and Representation Theory in
the North (ARTIN)£900

G. Sankaran

BathCalf Algebraic Geometry Seminar£600£1,150Scheme 4

Manchester, Swansea, Oxford,
Loughborough, Warwick£900

ApplicantInstitution

Collaborator

Institution

Grant

F. Ghahramani

Leeds, Newcastle, Lancaster£880

E.V. Ferapontov

LoughboroughS.P. Tsarev

Krasnoyarsk State
Pedagogical, Russia£250

R.J. Loy

Newcastle, Lancaster, Leeds£1,200D. Kahrobaei

St Andrews

E. Ghys,E. Breuillard

Ecole Normale
Superieure de Lyon,
IHES

£500

J. Grbic

Aberdeen

V. Buchstaber
T. Panov

Steklov Institute,
Moscow State£500

M.R. Pistorius

King's College
LondonF. Avram

Pau, France

£450

£632

S.E. Rees

S. Cleary

Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow

E.V. Ferapontov

M. Blaszak

Loughborough, Leeds,
Imperial College

A.J. Duncan

A.G. Myasnikov

QMUL, Newcastle, Manchester£390

H. Bruin

S. Vaienti

Surrey, Exeter, Imperial College£980£1,150cont’dTHE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

No. 339 July 2005

ICM 2006

Scheme 4 (cont’d)

16

ApplicantInstitution

Collaborator

Institution

Grant

P. Butkovic

Birmingham

K. Zimmermann

Charles, Prague£500

E. Winstanley

Sheffield

A. Ottewill,
E. RaduDublin, Maynooth£500

P.J. Rowley

Manchester

C. Parker

Birmingham£250

J.C. Wood

Leeds

L. Fernández

Universidad de losAndes, Colombia£500

B. Zegarlinski

Imperial
CollegeR. Olkiewicz

Wroclaw, Poland£500

G.A. Jones

Southampton

J. Wolfart

J-W Goethe, Frankfurt£500

A. Movchan

Liverpool

R.C. McPhedranSydney£500

V.C. Mavron

Aberystwyth

J.D. Key

Clemson, Aberystwyth£500

M. Feigin

Imperial
College

Y. Burman

Independent
University of Moscow£400

N. Heuer

BrunelA. Bespalov

Russian Academy of
Sciences£500

C. Christopher

Plymouth

D. Schlomiuk

Montreal£350

J.C. Wood

Leeds

D. Krupka,
O. Krupkova

Palacky, Olomouc,Czech Republic£500

J. Siemons

UEA

E. Konstantinova

Sobolev Institute ofMathematics, Russia£500

Scheme 5
ApplicantVisitor/Institution

To Visit

Grant

R.M. Williams

G.F.R. Ellis (Cape Town)

Cape Town, AIMS

£1,150W.J. Harvey

R. Kulkarni (Harish Chandra
Institute, India)

Harish Chandra
Institute, India£600

K. Brown (I. Gordon,
S. Majid, J. Rawnsley)

Representation Theory in
Differential Geometry &Physics Workshop

Benin£4,800S.C. Power

R. El-Harti (Hassan, Morocco)

Lancaster£1,625

Satellite conferences
Four more satellite conferences approved by
the Executive Committee of ICM 2006:• Methods of integrable systems in geometry,
Durham, UK,12-20 August, contact John
Bolton (john.bolton@durham.ac.uk)• Trends and challenges in calculus of variations and its applications, UCLM, Toledo,
Spain, 16-19 August, contact José Carlos
Bellido (JoseCarlos.Bellido@uclm.es)• Conference on routing and location 2006
(CORAL 2006), Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife,
14-17 September, contact Juan José Salazar(jjsalaza@ull.es)• Algebraic Geometry, Segovia, Spain, 16-19
August, contact Raquel Mallabibarrena(raquelm@mat.ucm.es)
Visit www.icm2006.org for further information.

COMBINATORICS,
AUTOMATA AND
NUMBER THEORY
An international school and conference on
Combinatorics, Automata and Number Theory(CANT2006) will be held in the Department ofMathematics, University of Liège, Belgiumfrom 8-19 May 2006. The proposed international school is aimed at presenting and developing recent trends in Combinatorics (withemphasis on Combinatorics on Words),
Automata Theory and Number Theory. On the
one hand, the newest results in these areas
shall benefit from a synthetic exposition, andon the other hand, emphasis on the connections existing between the main topics of theschool will be sought. Concurrently with theschool, there will be an international conference focusing on the same topics. Courses andlectures will be organized in the morning,
while the afternoon sessions will be devoted tothe conference. The main invited speakers are:• J.-P. Allouche (CNRS, Université Paris-Sud)• Y. Bugeaud (University of Strasbourg)• F. Durand (University of Picardie, Amiens)• P. Grabner (Technical University of Graz)• J. Karhumäki (Turku University)• H. Prodinger (University of Stellenbosch)• J. Sakarovitch (CNRS, ENS Télécom.)• J. Shallit (University of Waterloo)• B. Solomyak (University of Washington)• W. Thomas (RWTH, Aachen)
There will be five invited lecturers per
week. Participants can decide to attend oneof the two weeks of this event. Talks will beselected on the basis of an extended abstract(maximum six pages). Deadline for the submission of abstracts is 1 April 2006. Moredetails will be available in due time on theconference website www.cant2006.ulg.ac.beor email M.Rigo@ulg.ac.be.

UNIÓN MATEMÁTICA
DE AMÉRICA LATINAY EL CARIBE
Two congresses under the auspices of Unión
Matemática de América Latina y el Caribe(UMALCA):• The XIV ELAM (Escuela Latino Americana
de Matemática, Latin American School ofMathematics) will take place in Solis,
Uruguay, from 1-9 December 2005. ELAM is
one of the main mathematical events in
Latin America, and this edition is devoted
to Probability and Dynamical Systems. Visit
http://imerl.fing.edu.uy/elam for further
information.
• The Latin American Mathematical Union(UMALCA), the European MathematicalSociety (EMS), the Society for Industrial
and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the
SociétépourlesMathématiques
Appliquées et Industrielles (SMAI) areorganizing an International Congress ofApplied Mathematics to be held at theCenter for Mathematical Modelling(CMM), Universidad de Chile, in Santiago
de Chile on 13-17 March 2006.

17

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTERFUNCTION THEORYMEETING18

The annual one day Function Theory Meeting
will be held on Monday 19 September, in the
Hardy Room of the London MathematicalSociety building, De Morgan House, Russell
Square, London WC1B 4HS. There will be six
talks, preceded by coffee at 10.30, and withbreaks for lunch and tea.
• Darren Crowdy (Imperial College London)
New formulae for Schwarz-Christoffel
mappings to multiply-connected polygonal
domains• Alastair Fletcher (Warwick) Local rigidity of
infinite-dimensional Teichmüller spaces• Tom Tyler (Greenwich (retired)) The
Hadamard-Hayman constant• Giannis Platis (Durham) Developments oncomplex hyperbolic quasi-fuchsian space• Jim Langley (Nottingham) Integer points ofentire functions• Edward Fraenkel (Bath) Resolution of aquestion concerning the entry of a wedge
into water
The meeting is supported by an LMS conference grant. For further information contact the organiser Anthony G. (Tony)
O'Farrell, Mathematics Department, NUI,
Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland (Anthony.O
Farrell@nuim.ie).

LUMS INTERNATIONALCONFERENCE ON
MATHEMATICSLUMSInternational
ConferenceonMathematics 2005 (LICM05) will be organized by Lahore University of Management
Sciences, which will be held in Lahore,
Pakistan from 27-30 November, 2005. The
conference is devoted to recent advances inall areas of mathematics. The chief aim is toattract and bring together researchers for
useful discussion and future collaboration. It

No. 339 July 2005

is open to researchers world-wide. The
organizers invite the submission of shortabstract, presenting original research or substantial work in any area of mathematics.
There will be young speakers’ awards for PhD
students and overall best speaker award. The
key-note speakers will include:• Alexandru Dimca (France)• Ioan Tomesco (Romania)• Mark Bashmakov (Russia)• Arif Zaman (Pakistan)• Irene Scirich (Malta)• Tetsuo Ida (Japan)
and invited speakers will include• Jafar Biazar (Iran)• Rajesh Bawa (India)• Suthep Suantai (Thailand)
For further information and to complete
the registration form online, visit the website
at http://web.lums.edu.pk/~licm05 or write to
Dr Faqir M Bhatti, Convener of LICM05,
Department of Mathematics, School of Arts
andSciences,
LahoreUniversityofManagement Sciences, Sector U, DHA, Lahore
54792, Pakistan (email: fmbhatti@lums.edu.pk,
tel +92-42-5722670 ext 2123 or 2121).

EUCLID AND HIS HERITAGE
A Clay Mathematics Institute Conference on
Euclid and his Heritage will be held from
7-8 October in the Bernard Sunley Lecture
Theatre, St Catherine's College, Oxford. The
conference is on the occasion of the publication, for the first time, of a complete digital edition of the oldest surviving manuscript of Euclid’s Elements. Written around
300 BC, this is the founding document ofmathematics. The manuscript, dating fromthe year 888 AD, was copied by Stephen the
Clerk in Constantinople, and since 1804 has
been in the collection of the Bodleian
Library. The digital edition was prepared by
the Octavo corporation, which photographed the manuscript at the Bodleianin the autumn of 2004.

The conference will bring together classicists, historians, mathematicians and philosophers to provide a fresh look at Euclid's work,
the transmission of Greek science fromancient to modern times, and the influence
over twenty three centuries of the Greek revolution in mathematics – the body of knowledge in the form of an axiomatic system.
The conference is open to all – those in the
research and scholarly communities as well asanyone with an interest in the origins anddevelopment of scientific thought. For more
information visit: www.claymath.org/euclid.

HURDLES AND STRATEGIES“Why do they write a2+a3 = a5 and 3(x+4) =3x+4 and ...?” As all teachers of mathematics
will know, the teaching of algebra is notstraightforward and mistakes like theseoccur all too often. This book looks at, andtries to provide constructive suggestions toresolve, a wide range of errors like these.
The basis for the book comes from lists ofquestions about the teaching of algebra ingeneral, or algebraic manipulation in particular which were submitted by experienced mathematics teachers across thecountry for which they felt answers/suggestions would be of value. The topics, which
included items that the teachers foundchallenging as well as questions they had
been asked by colleagues or had been discussed at a departmental meeting, werecollated and sent round with the invitation
to submit strategies, suggestions or comments that people had found to be practically useful. It is hoped that the contents ofthis book will provide a stimulus for debate
as well as constructive suggestions for dealing with tricky issues.
Hurdles and Strategies in the Teaching of
Algebra collated by Tony Barnard (King’s
College London) is available from the
Mathematical Association (259 London Road,
Leicester LE2 3BE, email: Enquiry@MA.org.uk). The price for MA members is £6.00
and for non members £9.00.

19

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

RECORDS OF PROCEEDINGSAT MEETINGSREGIONAL ORDINARY MEETING
held on Wednesday 18 May 2005 at the University of Birmingham.
About 80 members and visitors were present for all or part of themeeting.

20

The meeting began at 2:20 pm, with Professor F.C. KIRWAN, FRS,
in the Chair. Seven people were elected to Ordinary Membership:
N.D.A. Aparicio, J.J. Bevan, A.M.G. Cox, M. Feigin, E. Garcia, P. Grindrod,
D.M. Leppinen; four people were elected to Associate Membership:
H. Aziz, A.E. Hamilton, H.R. Hill, A.M. Kasprzyk; and two people were
elected to Reciprocity Membership: W.B. Hart and K. Kitazaki.
The Record of the Proceedings of the Society Meeting held on
25 February 2005 was signed as a correct record.
Three members signed the book and were admitted to the Society.
Dr C. Parker introduced the Fröhlich Lecture given by Professor
R. Oliver on p-local structure of finite groups and of their classifying
spaces.
Dr C. Parker introduced a lecture given by Professor W.T. Gowers on
Is there another way to explain mathematics?.
Dr P. Flavell introduced a lecture given by Professor S. Smith on
Homology decompositions from subgroup complexes of finite groups.
The prize for the poster competition was awarded jointly to Murray
Clelland for Saturated fusion systems and Simon Nickerson for Lost ina sporadic group.
Professor Kirwan expressed the thanks of the Society to the localorganiser and the speakers for putting on such an excellent meeting.
After the meeting an open discussion on the LMS-IMA Frameworks
Study Initiative was led by Mr P.R. Cooper, Executive Secretary of the
London Mathematical Society, and Mr D. Youdan, Executive Directorof the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
A dinner was then held at Staff House, University of Birmingham.

No. 339 July 2005

LMS MIDLANDS REGIONALMEETING 2005
The Midlands Regional Meeting of the
London Mathematical Society was held on
Wednesday 18 May in the Watson Building at
the University of Birmingham. The meeting
was opened by the President, Frances
Kirwan, who then formally admitted threemembers to the Society.
Dr Chris Parker introduced Professor Bob
Oliver of Université Paris 13, who gave the
Fröhlich Lecture on p-local structure of finitegroups and of their classifying spaces. He
explained his proof of the Martino-Priddy
conjecture, which states that two groups
have the same p-local structure if and only iftheir classifying spaces have the same p-local
structure. The proof makes use of the theoryof saturated fusion systems and their associated centric linking systems, which were thesubject of the three-day LMS Workshop
which followed the Regional Meeting.
The second speaker was Professor Timothy
Gowers, who asked Is there another way to
explain mathematics? Professor Gowers
thought so, and explained that he was in theprocess of compiling a book to be entitled
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics.
He aims to collect, in one volume, a numberof essays on various aspects of mathematics
which would be of interest to experienced
mathematicians, undergraduate students
and the general public.
After the tea interval, Professor Stephen
Smith from the University of Illinois in
Chicago talked about Cohomology decompositions from subgroup complexes of finitegroups. Building on the foundations provided by the work of Tits on buildings, and of
Brown and Quillen on simplicial complexes ofp-subgroups of a group, Professor Smith
explained how the mod-2 cohomology of thesporadic groups may be decomposed bystudying certain 2-local geometries.
Following the third talk there was an open

discussion on the LMS-IMA Frameworks
Study Initiative.
Throughout the afternoon there was a display of posters in the mathematics department, with a prize of £100 worth of Springer
books to the best poster as judged byProfessors Oliver and Smith. Postgraduatesfrom many departments around the country
entered, and all the posters were of a very
high standard.
At the end of the meeting, many members
enjoyed the conference dinner held in Staff
House, during which the winners of theafternoon’s poster competition wereannounced. It was decided that the prize
would be split between two joint winners,
Murray Clelland and Simon Nickerson, bothfrom Birmingham.
For the subsequent three days there wasan LMS Workshop on Fusion systems, representation theory and groups. This covered anumber of topics including the use of fusion
systems in representation theory, the classification of p-local finite groups, the construction of exotic p-local finite groups and thestudy of p-local compact groups. The workshop was attended by many recognised
experts in the field including Bob Oliver, Ran
Levi, Carles Broto, Markus Linckelmann,
Stephen Smith and Andrew Chermak. The
study of fusion systems and p-local finitegroups is a fairly new and vibrant subject.
Each talk presented new ideas and directions
to be explored.
Murray Clelland
University of Birmingham

TURBULENCE, TWISTAND TREACLE
This meeting, which was supported by the
London Mathematical Society, was held incelebration of the 70th Birthday of Keith
Moffatt at the Isaac Newton Institute and theCentre for the Mathematical Sciences in
Cambridge during 21-22 April 2005. All or

21

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

22

many aspects of Keith Moffatt’s researchinterests were covered, including dynamics,
fluid dynamics and magneto-hydrodynamics(MHD). Contributions came from colleagues,
collaborators and former research students.
Papers on turbulence were given by Julian
Hunt (UCL), the very first lecture, and by Uriel
Frisch (Observatoire de Nice). Hunt spoke on
applications in industry as well as on the fundamentals (and associated difficulties in our
understanding), bringing in a relevant quotation from Dickens (‘Our Mutual Friend’) in connection with ‘impulse of vortices’! Frisch discussed difficulties with an inconsistent (or consistent?) framework of locally homogeneous
turbulence. Magnetic effects (with or without
turbulence) formed the themes of R. Moreau(Grenoble), Juri Toomre (Boulder) and Renzo
Ricca (Milan). Moreau spoke on MHD turbulence in the limit of small values of the magnetic Reynolds number, where phenomena similar to the famous Taylor diffusion emerged.
Toomre enthused on magnetism in relation to
our nearest star, while Ricca gave his account ofmagnetic knots and minimal braids.
Within the realms of fluid mechanics, instabilities of flow and associated emergence of
singularities, there were contributions from
Andrew Soward (Exeter), Jens Eggers (Bristol)and K. Bajer (Warsaw). Soward spoke on the
problem of instabilities in the flow between
two rotating spheres, a problem superficiallysimilar to Taylor's flow between two rotating
cylinders but with many grave differences,which the speaker elucidated. Eggers drewattention to singularities in flows at surfaces,
especially in connection with electric jets and‘selective withdrawal of oil through water’.
Bajer discussed his interests in tubes andsheets in fluids and the growing interest in
the question of the development of singularities; he found, for example, that compressibility can be relevant.
In physiological fluid dynamics, Tim Pedleyspoke on self-excited oscillations of collapsible tubes and showed instability diagrams

No. 339 July 2005

somewhat reminiscent of those of Benjaminand Mullin for the Taylor cylinder problem;
Moffatt's corner eddies cropped up also!
V. Vladimirov (Hull and York) discussed
fluid/solid structure interactions, of importancefor many applications, bringing in a host ofmathematical icons (van der Pol, for example).
The final word in the title of the meeting
was there in the contribution of John Hinch(Cambridge) who spoke about the ‘honeyspoon problem’, the prevention or otherwiseof dripping. This topic had been dear to
Moffatt’s heart but formally dealt with a thinfilm on the periphery of a rotating cylinder;
Hinch described several fascinating features
including shock-like phenomena.
Twist was in a sense the subject of the lecture of Y. Shimomura (Keio, Yokohama), whospoke about the dynamics of a spinning (oreven jumping!) egg, hard-boiled (or not). This
aspect of dynamics is related to the Tippe Top
and to the problem of a disk spinning on a surface but the speaker's lively lecture made it ahigh point, not least because this collaboration
with Keith Moffatt brought out the contributions made by Moffatt in much joint work; inthis case it is of recent origins, with papers in
Nature and Proc Roy Soc A and even a description in the Daily Telegraph. Shimamura evenmanaged a reference to the Trios performed(by the ‘McIntyre Trio’) at the David Crighton
Memorial Concert on 18 May 2001.
The final lecture was a fine discourse by Keith
Moffatt himself on drops and bubbles, on
strained vortex sheets and on flows in corners.
The meeting was a remarkable tribute to thecontributions that Moffatt has made in several
fields of Applied Mathematics. We are indebted to Michael Proctor, who led the organisationof the meeting, and to his colleagues for the
excellentarrangements.
Unfortunately,
Professor Proctor was unable to attend due toillness. However, the Meeting was enjoyed by
all who had the good fortune to be present.
Trevor Stuart
Imperial College London

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THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

No. 339 July 2005

PRIZE FOR
MATHEMATICIAN’SPORTRAIT24

A portrait of a mathematician has won the
top prize at the Royal Society of Portrait
Painters annual show. John Wonnacott’s
painting of Professor Bernard de Neumann
won the £10,000 Ondaatje prize. Professor
de Neumann has been an LMS member
since 1981.
Dr Emery writes:
Bernard de Neumann was educated at theRoyal Hospital School, and then Birmingham
University. Following his MSc he joined
Marconi Research Laboratories (MRL) at
Great Baddow, Essex where he spent almost
25 years working as a ‘pure’ applied mathematician. His work included modelling
Concorde, in order to show that it could landsafely, and modelling various missile systems.
Whilst there, he became interested in themathematics of reliable systems and the optimal logistics of supporting military and large
civil operational systems.
In 1986 he was made an Honorary Visiting
Professor in the Mathematics Department at
City University, London, later joining thedepartment as a Professor in 1988. In 1989 he
was appointed Research Professor at City in
the Centre for Software Reliability.
He left City in 1995 to join the Ministry of
Defence, especially to work on a problem
that he had become interested in whilst he
was at Marconi Research Laboratories. He
retired in 1999 becoming, for a while, a nonexecutive director of the Essex Health
Authority. He now devotes much of his time
to researching Naval History.
I worked for Bernard in 1980 during histime at MRL where I spent a year’s sabbaticalleave and was later involved with him in a
NATO Advanced Study Institute on Electronic
Systems Effectiveness and Life Cycle Costingorganised by Bernard’s boss at that time,

Joseph Skwirzynski. Bernard is one of thoserare people who enriches those around him
with his companionship and profound understanding. I was therefore delighted to see
John Wonnacott's portrait of Professor
Bernard de Neumann which recently won the
Ondaatje prize.
David Emery
Staffordshire University

Professor de Neumann writes:
John Wonnacott CBE is a famous British artist
noted for his landscape/seascape paintings –in fact he is now considered Britain’s best
landscape painter since John Constable.
Seventeen years ago, or so, I was waiting
for a train at Chalkwell Station when astranger came up to me and asked if I wasProfessor de Neumann, and when I said yes,
he said “would I mind if he painted my portrait?” This is not a request I’d expected toreceive, but after some discussions on the
train revolving around his explanation of his
special interest in ultra-wide-angle landscapes, and my reconciling this with projective geometry, I agreed to sit for him. John
has now painted about a dozen portraits ofme, and they hang in such places as Beverly
Hills USA, Greenwich Village USA, Sydney
and the Tate (British) and National Portrait
Gallery in London. John rather generously
says that he learned his portraiture skills frompainting me, and about two years ago told
me that there was something special about
his latest portrait. In fact, in a famous recent
painting to commemorate the Queen
Mother’s 100th birthday, John painted ahuge picture (12 feet high!) of the Queen
Mother surrounded by the Queen, Duke of
Edinburgh, Prince Charles and his two sonsand the corgies. This picture was constructedusing techniques he developed and learnt
from painting me and another model.
About six months ago he told me that thelatest portrait of me was being entered for
the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual
show in The Mall. On 26 April he phoned measking if I could attend The Mall Galleries thenext day for a “photo opportunity and Press
Conference”, as he (with my portrait) had
won a prize. It transpired that he had won
the top prize of the Ondaatje Prize forPortraiture of the RSPP (£10,000 + a gold
medal). The prize was presented by the Dukeof Kent.
Bernard de Neumann

HERBERT JAMES GODWIN
Professor Jim Godwin, who was elected amember of the London MathematicalSociety on 15 December 1949, died on the 4
April 2005. Born in Wiltshire, he was the
only child of a farmer. At the age of 9 hewon a scholarship to Bristol Grammar
School. A further scholarship took him to
Trinity College, Cambridge in 1941. He
obtained a first class in Part II of theMathematical Tripos. During the war he
was drafted into the Ministry of Supply,
working on statistical and mathematicalproblems. It was during this period that he
met his future wife Sheila Mayer, and theymarried in 1947. When the war ended he
was appointed to a lectureship in
Mathematics
atUniversity
College,
Swansea.
In 1968 Professor Godwin established a
new Department of Statistics and Computer
Science at Royal Holloway, University of
London.
His main research area was in a branch ofnumber theory called Aliquot Sequences.
These depend on the sum of the positive
divisors of a number, excluding the number
itself: the process is iterated to form asequence. It is an open question whether
these sequences always cycle, or end in one.
He published his first paper as an undergraduate and continued active research until
his death this year. He published over 80
papers.
After a long and happy marriage hiswife Sheila died in 2003. He is survived
by his son William and his daughter
Freida.
Professor Godwin was extremely courteous and well liked. To sum up his life in a single phrase, he was a scholar and a gentleman.
Alan R. Davies
Dept of Computer Science
Royal Holloway, University of London

25

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

No. 339 July 2005

BOOK REVIEWLONDON MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
POPULAR LECTURES 2005
Royal Institution, London – Friday 15 July
Manchester University – Wednesday 28 September
Dr Joan Lasenby

The Mathematics of Shrek

26‘How does mathematics, coupledwith immense computational
power, produce the stunningvisual effects in movies likeShrek and Toy Story?’

Dr Alan Slomson

What Computers Cannot Do‘Computers can solve manymathematical problems. But, nomatter how powerful they become,mathematics tells us there are limits
to their problem-solving ability.’LONDON (Royal Institution, 21 Albermale Street) Commences at 7.00 pm,
refreshments at 8.00 pm, ends at 9.30 pm. Admission is free, with ticket.
Apply by 8 July to Lee-Anne Taylor, London Mathematical Society, De Morgan
House, 57-58 Russell Square, London WC1B 4HS (email: taylor@lms.ac.uk).
A stamped addressed envelope would be appreciated.
MANCHESTER (Ruthersford Theatre, Schuster Building, Brunswick Street)
Commences at 6.30 pm, refreshments at 7.30 pm, ends at 9.00 pm. Admission
is free. Enquiries to Catherine Fox, Department of Mathematics, University ofManchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL (tel: 0161 306 4013,
email: catherine.fox@manchester.ac.uk).

M.C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry by Doris
Schattschneider, Thames & Hudson, ISBN: 0
500 511691, pp 354, £19.95.
Escher’s fascination with the world of symmetry has always endeared his art to mathematicians. We can’t hope for a better illustrator to bring alive some of the great stories ofmathematics: the beautiful pictures he produced which illustrate the 17 different planesymmetry groups, his pictures of hyperbolic
space where devils and angels disappear into
the infinite edge of the disc, his ants crawlingendlessly around the Möbius strip.
If anyone is looking for a book which collects together the best of Escher’s art thenDoris Schattschneider’s book M. C. Escher:
Visions of Symmetry is a must. John Conway
once described to me how he has the bookopen on his piano and tries to ration himself
to one illustration a day. If he does feel thetemptation to treat himself to more than one
illustration then he always insists on leaving
the room and entering again before heallows himself to turn the page.
The illustrations are matched by an equallyfascinating commentary from the author. This
provides a complete analysis of the different
symmetry groups that are hidden behindeach illustration together with biographicaldetails to explain Escher’s intellectual andartistic journey. Escher’s most popular tilings
are those involving rotational symmetrywhilst simple reflection groups like pm, reflections in two parallel lines, hardly get a look in.
The first edition was published in 1990 but
this year sees a new edition released withnew material. This mainly consists of a new‘Afterword’ which documents the developments since the first publication and probably
doesn’t justify forking out again for anotheredition. But those who are buying for the firsttime will enjoy the extra section.
Although a book can give some inkling ofan artist’s work, nothing beats seeing theartist’s originals. On a recent trip to Holland
I took the opportunity to go to the new
Escher Museum in Den Hague which openedin 2002. Escher’s work is housed in a beautiful small eighteenth century palace and thebuilding itself is worth the visit. My nine-year
old son particularly enjoyed the virtual reality exhibit housed at the top of the museum
which allows visitors to immerse themselvesin Escher’s paradoxical worlds. I couldn’t get
my two-year old twins out of Escher’s magic
chamber where proportions help create aworld where I was dwarfed by my children.
Escher would have appreciated their symmetry even if the rather prim museum assistants
didn’t.
For me the highlight was seeing in theflesh a beautiful icosahedral tin box designed
by Escher for the 75 anniversary of the Dutch
company Verblifa. I often use a picture of thebox in my talks about group theory. Escher
tessellates the box with a design of shells andstar-fish but introduces a twist in the star-fish
to destroy the reflectional symmetry of theundecorated icosahedron. The resulting symmetry group of Escher’s box is the alternatinggroup A5, the first non-abelian group in
Conway et al’s Atlas of simple groups.
Another interesting part of the exhibition
was Escher’s early work depicting Italianlandscapes. The illustrations bring alive thebreathtaking Amalfi coast with its cliffs andstrange rock formations. The towns thathang to the side of the cliffs leap out of thepictures. This is a very 3 dimensional worldthat Escher was trying to capture. With therise of the fascists in the 1930s Escher left
Italy and returned to his native Holland. The
obsession with tiling the plane was (Escher
explained) his reaction to the challenge ofthe flat 2-dimensional landscape that surrounded him in Holland. The transition fromhis early work to the Escher we are familiar
with is captured in a woodcut dated May
1937 called Metamorphosis. On the left of
the illustration is the coastal town of Atrani.

27

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MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

28

But as the picture evolves across the canvas,
the cube shaped buildings of the town
morph into a hexagonal tiling of 2-dimensional Chinese boys.
Another woodcut Metamorphosis II
expands on this theme of transition in
Escher’s work and stretches for some 12 feet.
The enigmatic piece is brought to life in ashort film made by Michelle Emmer. Emmer isthe editor with Schattschneider of a volumeof essays about Escher’s work that grew outof a centenary meeting in Rome in 1998. The
volume includes a CD which includes lots offantastic visual material to accompany thebook including Emmer’s short film ofMetamorphosis II. The volume makes a fascinating compliment to Schattschneider’sbook. It includes essays by artists inspired byEscher’s legacy, educationalists who haveused Escher’s works in the classroom to bringalive mathematical ideas and essays on someof the mathematics behind Escher’s prints
including two articles by Coxeter. Coxeter
was influential in Escher’s move in the 1950s

No. 339 July 2005

from the Euclidean plane into tilings of thehyperbolic plane.
One of the most fascinating articles is by
Hofstader of Godel, Escher, Bach fame. It
includes a wonderful story of Mick Jagger’s
request to ‘Maurits’ to design some illustrations for a forthcoming album cover. Escher
was somewhat dismayed by the appropriationof his work by the 60s hippy movement. But
worse still was Jagger’s familiar tone: ‘pleasetell Mr. Jagger I am not Maurits to him, but
Very sincerely, M.C. Escher.’ But the main
thrust of Hofstadter’s essay is a defence of theartistic value of Escher’s work. The artistic
world has always been rather snobby about
Escher’s work, complaining that the predictability of the mathematics detracts fromits artistic value. But the books of Emmer andSchattschneider together with the museum in
Den Hague are a wonderful celebration of
why Escher remains a favourite amongst manymathematicians and hippies alike.
Marcus du Sautoy
University of Oxford

LMS SPITALFIELDSDAY REPORTGroups of Finite Morley Rank
This Spitalfields Day took place at the Isaac
Newton Institute on 16 March 2005 as part ofthe programme on Model Theory andApplications to Algebra and Analysis. The
day was aimed at a wide mathematical audience (graduate students working in algebra,
model theory, number theory were especiallywelcome). The talks gave an accessible firsthand account of recent developments in classification of simple groups of finite Morleyrank and their surprising relation to number
theory, quantum groups and the classification of finite simple groups. There wereabout 60 participants, about 20 of whomcame to the Newton Institute especially forthat day. There was a large group from
Oxford University, as well as participantsfrom Queen Mary, St Andrews, Nottingham,
Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Mons
(Belgium).
Tuna Altinel (Université Lyon) gave theopening talk The programme for classification of groups of finite Morley rank, a general introduction to the topic of the day, withsome ideas for the future. The Morley rank is
a notion of dimension defined on definable
sets, and which behaves very much in theway algebraic dimension (of a variety)behaves in algebraic geometry.
The Algebraicity Conjecture states that asimple group of finite Morley rank is in fact
the set of K-rational points of a simple algebraic group defined over an algebraicallyclosed field K. This conjecture was first statedthirty years ago, and important advanceswere made in the past few years. The current
state of progress was then described.
Altinel explained the important role ofinvolutions in the study of these groups, andhow the strategy of the proof gets someinspiration from CFSG, the Classification ofFinite Simple Groups, a monumental work

which was completed 20 years ago. As withfinite simple groups, one attempts to prove
the result by induction, and the study of the
2-Sylow subgroups is fundamental. The casewhen the 2-Sylow subgroups are infinite andhave bounded exponent is now complete: asimple group of finite Morley rank with infinite 2-Sylow subgroups of bounded exponent is indeed the set of rational points of analgebraic group over an algebraically closed
field of characteristic 2.
The two remaining cases of the conjecture
are therefore the ‘odd type case’ (the connected components of the 2-Sylow subgroups are abelian divisible, case whichshould correspond to a field of characteristic
not equal to 2), and the ‘degenerate type’(the 2-Sylow subgroups are finite, case which
one wishes to eliminate).
Gregory Cherlin (Rutgers) discussed thegeometric aspects of the proof, and how the
study of complex reflection groups plays arole in his talk Ultraproducts and complex
reflection groups. After reviewing the role of
Coxeter groups and Dynkin diagrams in the
structure of simple algebraic groups via theCurtis-Tits theorem, he sketched a proof of aGeneric Identification Theorem for groups offinite Morley rank, in which crystallographic
Coxeter groups were identified via an ultraproduct representation combined with theShepherd-Todd classification of complex
reflection groups.
Eric Jaligot (Université Paris 7) explainedsome of the tools recently developed, in particular the notion of unipotent subgroups
and their good behaviour in his talk Good
tori and bad fields. He also introduced Carter
subgroups (a definable, connected subgroupwhich is nilpotent and of finite index in its
normaliser). These subgroups are now known
to exist in all groups of finite Morley rank. He
also discussed some genericity results,
notably on ‘good tori’, a very natural concept, and which has given some surprising
results.
cont’d29

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER30

One of the potential source of counterexamples to the Algebraicity Conjecture is thepossible existence of ‘bad fields’, i.e., an algebraically closed field with a distinguishedpredicate for an infinite proper subgroup of
its multiplicative group, and which has finite
Morley rank. It is believed that these fields do
not exist in positive characteristic, but thatthey do exist in characteristic zero. Boris
Zilber (Oxford) with a talk entitled The algebraicity conjecture: some thoughts against
explained how the existence or non-existence of bad fields had some relation withthe ‘Zariski structures’ that he and Ehud
Hrushovski introduced in the 90s, and withthe exotic strongly minimal structures built
by Hrushovski. He concluded his talk with adescription of non-standard Zariski structures, and their surprising connection to‘Quantum tori’.
The last talk of the day was given by
Alexandre Borovik (Manchester) on Finitegroup theory: the next generation. After
recalling the role played in the study ofgroups of finite Morley rank by a wide
range of subjects involved in the CFSG, heobserved that there are a number of competing strategies for the finite Morley rankcase, all equally powerful, but based on different aspects of the proofs known (orunder construction) in the finite case. He
then proceeded to describe briefly the various existing proofs (or attempts toward a
proof) of the CFSG: the first, second andthird generation.
He also expressed the belief that thenotion of connectedness, which plays a very
important role in the study of groups offinite Morley rank, might have an analogue
for finite simple groups, and gave a possible
definition. He then proceeded to list a seriesof results known to be true for simple groupsof finite Morley rank, and proposed the corresponding (translated) questions for finite
simple groups.
Zoé Chatzidakis

No. 339 July 2005

DE MORGAN ATFITZWILLIAM
Members may recall an article in the
October 2003 Newsletter about the De
Morgan Centre which commemorates
William De Morgan, the eldest son ofAugustus De Morgan.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, hassome superb bowls and vases by William De
Morgan (1839-1917), their shimmering,
metallic glazes inspired by the rich colorationof Italian majolica, and the exotic iridescenceof Iznik ware. De Morgan’s efforts to masterthese glazes were not without cost. The
home-made kiln in his first workshop in
Fitzroy Square set fire to the roof.
Undaunted, De Morgan continued his hazardous experiments in later workshops, his
idiosyncratic tiles of stylised – and often startled – birds and animals enjoying particular

Fitzwilliam Museum

success. Lewis Carroll found them a fitting
adornment to the rooms in Christ Church,
Oxford, where he wrote Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, while the Tsar of Russia commissioned a set of tiles for his yacht. De
Morgan supplied Morris & Co. with decorated ceramics for years, and in 1882 moved
from his chaotic workshop in Chelsea to a
purpose-built pottery close to William
Morris’s new premises at Merton Abbey, near
Wimbledon. De Morgan and Morris working
alongside each other, in friendship and collaboration, were the stuff of which the Arts
and Crafts movement was made.

IF YOU COULD TEACH THE
WORLD JUST ONE THING . . .
On 10 May a symposium was held at theRoyal Institution with this intriguing title. It
was an event organised by the RI together
with spiked* and NESTA (the National
Endowment for Science, Technology and theArts).
We started with short clips from a film inwhich some scientists told us what they
thought. Apparently some 250 scientists
and scientific editors were interviewed forthis survey. Marcus du Sautoy, wearing his
number 17 football shirt (as indeed he wasfor real, for he was in the capacity audience), spoke up for Euclid’s proof that there
is an infinity of primes, and bemoaned thefact that there aren’t enough teachers to
put across the beauty, joy and excitementof mathematics. Lisa Saksida, a neurophysiologist, would hope to destroy the myth ofthe mind/brain dichotomy, arguing thatthey are inseparable. Mark Modownik, amaterials scientist, spoke up for the newalchemy, looking at the ways in which we
can nowadays transform one material intoanother and finally another neuroscientist,
Mark Lythgoe, argued in favour of everyone understanding how we view the world
differently because of the impact of scienceand the scientific method. In particular heraised the question of whether thisapproach can tell us what consciousness is.
We then proceeded to the live part of theevening – a panel discussion chaired by
Vivienne Parry, the writer and broadcaster.
Each panellist spoke for 5 minutes and thendiscussion was open to the floor. Simon
Singh (no introduction necessary!) spoke ofthe importance of the scientific method andreferred to the history of theories about the‘Big Bang’ in matching theory to observed
data. Philip Ball, a consultant editor with
Nature, discussed the non-democratic
nature of science: all may have ideas andcontribute, but in the end some ideas areright and some are wrong. He suggested
that if people understood the process ofhealthy scepticism involved in hypothesisingand testing – and if scientists were better at
explaining these processes – more would
accept science as the best way of understanding how the world works.
Tracey Brown is a sociologist and directorof ‘Sense About Science’. She was concerned
about both the underuse and the overuse ofscience in public debate: underuse in thatscientific advice is often watered down sothat a generally ignorant public can digest
it; overuse in that it is used to pre-emptdebate which should more properly fall into
the realms of morals or ethics. She suggested that scientists, while continuing to show
the beauty and excitement of their subject,should not thereby be seduced away fromstating what is true. Sir Colin Berry is emeritus professor of pathology at Queen Mary
University of London. His view is that the
public look for certainty from scientists, but
the scientific process is not intuitive andeach step must be clearly demonstrated.
Certainty is not always possible. Since ‘public opinion’ gets turned into functioning law
two-thirds of the time, and much of it isformed by ‘focus groups’ we need to be surethat the public is well informed.
cont’d31

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

There was then an open debate. The quantifying of risk was clearly something which
exercised many in the audience, as was theover-protective attitude to science in schools.
Young people no longer have the opportunity to do any experimentation and are being
turned off science, which is creating a vicious
spiral of shortage of teachers for the future.
(Though whether we need to go as far as ‘thebest experiments are those in which there is astrong probability that the demonstrator may
die’ is perhaps a moot point!) Likewise inmathematics we need to extend beyond thenarrow confines of the (National) curriculum
to show the excitement involved. This again
comes back to the supply of enthusistic, wellmotivated (and well-remunerated) teachers.

No. 339 July 2005

Other points made included the benefits of‘real’ scientists, engineers and so on going
into schools to enthuse students; the interconnectedness of science and technology –ideas from the scientists being developed by
the technologists, then providing new opportunities for science to move forward; the factthat people seem more impressed by technology than by science; the ‘disprovability’ ofscientific theory; “science is just another
opinion/oh, no it isn’t ...”
And so the debate continued as we wentout into Albemarle Street at the end of avery stimulating evening.
Martin Perkins*www.spiked-online.com

COMPUTATIONAL DIFFERENTIAL
EQUATIONSLMS/EPSRC Short Course
University of Manchester, 11–16 September 2005
Organiser: Professor Nicholas J. Higham
Differential equations (DEs) are ubiquitous in science and engineering, being used for
all kinds of modelling and prediction. The solutions to most DEs have no convenient
explicit form and hence the numerical solution of differential equations is a subjectof fundamental importance.
This course provides an overview of three important topics in the computational solution of DEs, covering theoretical and numerical aspects and practical computation in
MATLAB. The lectures will be supported by laboratory classes. The course lecturers are:
• N.J. Higham (Manchester)• L.N. Trefethen (Oxford)• D.J. Higham (Strathclyde)

A brief introduction to MATLAB
Spectral methods for ODEs and PDEs
Stochastic differential equations
and their numerical simulation• D.J. Silvester (Manchester) Finite element methods for elliptic PDEs

32

An opening guest lecture will be given by P.K. Jimack (Leeds).

The London Mathematical Society was established during
the energetic and confident heyday of Victorian Britain.
Although several learned societies pre-date it, the LMS
can claim to have led the way in a number of respects:
firstly, in the rigorous reviewing standards it set from theoutset, with two independent reviewers being appointed
for each paper submitted to the Proceedings; and secondly,in its acceptance of women as full members, which wasprogressive for its day.
This volume, which contains over eighty photographs, concentrates on the first 100
years of the Society’s existence and traces its evolution through its Presidents and
De Morgan Medallists, each of whom was a pre-eminent mathematician of his or
her day. Through them we learn which branches of the discipline were in vogue
at any particular time, and come to appreciate the Society’s rich history.
The Book of Presidents 1865-1965 is available from the London Mathematical Society.
Email lms@lms.ac.uk to place your order. The LMS members price is £15, the full
price is £19.

The course is aimed at mathematics PhD students working in any area that requires
computational solution of DEs; it assumes a familiarity with numerical analysis but nota strong background in the subject. Experience in programming is assumed, but it is
not necessary for the students to be familiar with MATLAB; sample programs will be
provided. For further information see: www.ma.man.ac.uk/~higham/cde05.
The registration fee is £100. The accommodation costs for all UK-based research students are covered by EPSRC. Participants must pay their own travel costs. EPSRC-supported students can expect that their registration fees and travel costs will be met by
their departments from the EPSRC Doctoral Training Account. Postdocs and non-UK
students will be required to pay their own subsistence costs.
Application forms may be obtained from Isabelle Robinson, Administrative Officer,
London Mathematical Society, De Morgan House, 57-58 Russell Square, London WC1B 4HS(email: robinson@lms.ac.uk, fax: 020 7291 9978) or an on-line form is available on the
LMS website: www.lms.ac.uk/activities/research_meet_com/short_course/27_form.html.
Numbers will be limited and those interested are advised to make an early application. The closing date for applications is Friday 15 July. Completed forms should be
returned to the Administrative Officer by email, fax or post (details above). All applicants will be contacted by the London Mathematical Society approximately one week
after this deadline; we will not be able to give information about individual applications before then. Please do not send any money until we ask.

33

THE LONDON
MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
NEWSLETTER

No. 339 July 2005

CALENDAR OF EVENTSThis calendar lists Society meetings andother events publicised in the Newsletter.
Further information can be obtained fromthe appropriate LMS Newsletter whose number is given in brackets. A fuller list of meetings and events is given on the Society’s website (www.lms.ac.uk/meetings/calendar.html).

JULY 2005

34

4 Scalar Mixing in Fluid Flows & Mappings
Meeting Exeter University (335)
4-8 Problems & Perspectives Symposium,
Cadi Ayad Université, Marrakech (335)
4-8 Pure Model Theory Workshop, East
Anglia University (336)
4-8 Coagulation-Fragmentation Process
ICMS Workshop, Edinburgh (336)
4-9 Nonlinear Wave Phenomena
LMS/EPSRC Short Course, Reading
University (337)
7-9 International Colloquium,
Monst-Hainaut University, Belgium,
8 LMS Northern Regional Meeting, York (339)8-10 Algorithms & Complexity Workshop,
Durham University (338)10-14 Mathematical Modelling andApplications Conference, City University,
London (321)10-15 British Combinatorial Conference,
Durham University (329)10-16 Algebraic Topology LMS/EPSRC Short
Course, University of Wales, Swansea (337)11-15 Inverse Problems in Engineering
Conference: Theory & Practice, Cambridge
University (320)11-15 Model Theory, Algebraic & Analytic
Geometry Euro Conference, INI, Cambridge(332)
11-22 Equidistribution in Number Theory
NATO ASI Summer School, Montréal,
Canada (334)
15 LMS Popular Lectures, Royal Institution,
London (339)17-14 Aug Atlantic Association for Researchin the Mathematical Sciences Summer
School, Dalhousie University, Canada (333)18-20 Albert Einstein Century International
Conference, Paris, France (332)22-28 International Mathematics
Competition for University Students,
American University, Bulgaria (334)22-1 Aug Geometry, Conformal Field
Theory and String Theory Durham
Symposium, Durham University (333)25-29 Gregynog Workshop on
Computational Techniques in Spectral
Theory & Related Topics, Gregynog Hall,
Powys (320)30-6 Aug Groups St Andrews 2005
Conference, St Andrews University (332)

AUGUST 2005
1-5 Pattern Formation Training Course,
INI, Cambridge (335)1-17 Representation Theory in Differential
Geometry & Physics Workshop, Benin
Republic, West Africa (338)2-12 Operator Theory and Spectral Analysis
Durham Symposium, Durham University (333)5-11 Mathematical Logic Conference,
Budapest, Hungary (335)8-12 Developments in Experimental
Pattern Formation Conference, INI,
Cambridge (335)17-21 Pacific Rim Conference onMathematics, Fudan University, China (334)18-19 New Directions in Numerical
Relativity INI Satellite Workshop,
Southampton University (335)20-22 Algebra, Geometry, Analysis &Mechanics Conference, Islamabad,
Pakistan (338)21-27 Global General Relativity
Conference, INI, Cambridge (334)24-26 Model Reduction & Coarse-Graining
Approaches for Multiscale PhenomenaWorkshop, Leicester University (338)30-1 Sep Recent Advances in Non-linear
Mechanics, IMA Conference, Aberdeen
University (330)35

MARY LUCY CARTWRIGHT
DE MORGAN MEDALLIST1968

On 20 June 1968, the President announced
that the De Morgan Medal was awarded toMiss Cartwright. He reviewed her work on
interpolatory function theory, entire functions,boundary properties of functions defined in
the disc, non-linear differential equations andthe theory of cluster sets. He made particularmention of her work on the behaviour of ameromorphic function in the neighbourhoodof a sufficiently thin set of singularities and hertheorems on level curves of entire functions.
He concluded: ‘Miss Cartwright's achievements
fully justify her reputation as one of the leading classical analysts of her time.’