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The University of Cambridge has announced the winners of one of its oldest and most prestigious prizes.

The Adams Prize is awarded jointly each year by the Faculty of Mathematics and St John’s College to UK-based researchers, under the age of 40, doing first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences.

This year’s topic was “The Mathematics of Networks”, and the prize has been awarded jointly to Dr Heather Harrington (University of Oxford) and Dr Luitgard Veraart (London School of Economics and Political Science).

Professor Mihalis Dafermos, Chair of the Adams Prize Adjudicators, said:

Dr Harrington has adapted ideas from areas such as algebraic geometry and algebraic topology and applied them in a novel way to real world problems, with particular emphasis on those arising in biology. Her broad work ranges from the mathematics of biological networks to detailed empirical studies.

Dr Veraart has developed new tools and concepts relevant for the representation and analysis of financial stability and systemic risk in banking networks. Her work has had considerable visibility and impact, both within academia and outside.”

The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John’s College. It is currently worth approximately £15,000. It commemorates Adams’s role in the discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.

For further information, please contact:

  1. Undergraduate Office, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge.
    Tel: 01223 337968; e-mail: adamsprize@maths.cam.ac.uk
  2. Office of External Affairs and Communications, University of Cambridge.
    Tel: 01223 332300; e-mail: communications@admin.cam.ac.uk