Miscellany

New members

We welcome Dr Konstantin Ardakov, Dr David Ellis and Dr Behrang Noohi to the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary and to the Pure Mathematics group.

Resources

Members of the Pure Mathematics group are responsible for various Web resources, including the Atlas of Finite Group Representations, DesignTheory.org, and the British Combinatorial Committee.

We keep records of the London Algebra colloquium; these comprise an almost complete list of talks in this Colloquium since the first meeting on 25 October 1950. Over 1200 talks are listed here.

Awards and honours

The paper "A polynomial-time algorithm for estimating the partition function of the ferromagnetic Ising model on a regular matroid", by Leslie Ann Goldberg and Mark Jerrum, received the best paper award at International Colloquium on Automata Languages and Programming 2010. It is published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2011, Volume 6755/2011, Springer-Verlag, October 2010, 521-532; doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-22006-7_44.

Congratulations to Matt Fayers on his recent promotion.

Peter Keevash has been awarded the European Prize in Combinatorics for 2009. An announcement can be found here.

Ian Macdonald has been awarded the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition for his book Symmetric Functions and Hall Polynomials. The citation is here.

Wilfrid Hodges was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in July 2009. See the Web page.

Angus Macintyre is the Immediate Past President of the London Mathematical Society. He was elected to the Academia Europaea in July 2008.

Mark Jerrum was awarded the 2006 Fulkerson Prize by the Mathematical Programming Society. Read the citation here.

Peter Cameron toured New Zealand as the 2008 Forder lecturer of the London Mathematical Society. He also gave the second Kathleen Ollerenshaw Lecture in Manchester on 24 October 2007; the G. C. Steward lectures at  Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in March and May 2008; the Copson Lecture at the University of St Andrews in December 2009; and the Coulter McDowell Lecture at Royal Holloway, University of London, in November 2010.

Other events

In October 2011, we hosted the inaugural Aitken lecturer, Geoff Whittle, from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, whose visit was sponsored by the London and New Zealand Mathematical Societies. He spoke on "Well-quasi-ordering binary matroids" on 14 October, and on "Matroid representation over infinite fields" on 17 October. Slides of the two talks can be found here and here, and an account of the visit is available here.

Professor Leonard Soicher's inaugural lecture, entitled Combinatorial design theory is not just for Sudoku, took place at 6:30 pm on 26 November 2009, in the Skeel Lecture Theatre, People's Palace. Further details are available here.

On 9 November 2009, we held a symposium to mark the retirement and celebrate the career of Ian Chiswell. Details are here.