Faculty of Mathematics on Twitter
The Faculty of Mathematics has a presence on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FacultyMaths
Each month, a different member of the Faculty will run the twitter account - our aim is to bring insight into different aspects of life working and studying at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. We are inspired by Curators of Sweden.
May 2019
May's tweets will be by Colm-cille Caulfield - Professor of Environmental and Industrial Fluid Dynamics in the Department of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics, and also a faculty member of the BP Institute. He is a Professorial Fellow, College Lecturer in Mathematics, and Director of Studies for Part III Mathematics at Churchill College.
He is Chair of the Part III Committee, responsible for this Faculty of Mathematics Masters-level course, which typically has ~250 students (160 of which are non-Cambridge undergraduates) and ~80 courses. He is the the Cambridge Director of the Summer School for Fluid Dynamics of Sustainability and the Environment, jointly run with Ecole polytechnique in Paris. He is on the Executive Committee of the Summer Study Program in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Division of Fluid Dynamics and an Associate Editor of the (CUP) Journal of Fluid Mechanics, responsible for “Rapid” publications. His research focusses on stability, transition and mixing in environmental and industrial flows, particularly where density differences play a dynamically significant role. His teaching focusses on equipping students with the applied mathematical techniques and physical modelling skills needed to describe the natural world.
Previous Curators
March 2019
March's tweets were by Julia Hawkins. Julia is the Deputy Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project, which supports maths education for ages 3 to 19 and lifelong learning for the public. The project is a pioneering collaboration between the Faculties of Mathematics and Education, and our innovative free online resources reach millions of students and teachers each year.
February 2019
February's tweets will be by Daniel Keitley (https://twitter.com/DanKeitley). He is an MRes+PhD student within DAMTP on the Wellcome Trust Mathematical Genomics and Medicine programme. Having joined the faculty in October, he is relatively new to Cambridge but has worked in the past with Dr Stephen Eglen on mathematical models of the developing visual system. He is mostly interested in computational neuroscience, machine learning theory and how machine learning methods can be applied to problems in medicine and healthcare. He is using this first MRes year of his programme to take various courses and undertake research rotations in these areas across the university.
December 2018
December's tweets were by the communications office of the Isaac Newton Institute. The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences is a national and international visitor research institute. It runs research programmes on selected themes in mathematics and the mathematical sciences with applications over a wide range of science and technology. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from the UK and overseas to interact in research over an extended period. Based on the Centre for Mathematical Sciences campus in Cambridge, the INI was opened in July 1992, after four years of careful preparation. For a number of years and a variety of reasons, a need had been felt for a UK national institute in mathematics and theoretical physics. The realisation of this idea became possible with the availability of "pump-priming" financial support from Cambridge Colleges, notably St John's College and Trinity College (through the Isaac Newton Trust).
November 2018
November's tweets were by Dr Matthew B Wingate. Matthew is a Reader in Theoretical Physics in DAMTP and a College Lecturer in Mathematics at Fitzwilliam College. Most of his research focuses on the strong and weak interactions of quarks, using computational and theoretical methods to be able to infer what experimental measurements mean for the theory of elementary particles. Beyond maths, physics, and computing, Matthew enjoys running outdoors and listening to jazz.
October 2018
As last year, October 2018's tweets were retweets of @CambTweetMaths. #CambTweet is an initiative from Cambridge University Students' Union to showcase Cambridge University students' lives - warts and all! @CambTweetMaths is curated this year by a third year undergraduate student from Peterhouse.
September 2018
September's tweets were by Dr Helen Mason OBE
Dr Helen Mason is solar scientist at the University of Cambridge. Her field of research is solar physics, in particular the ultraviolet and X-ray spectrum of the Sun. She has worked on many joint UK, NASA, ESA and Japanese space projects including Skylab, the Solar Maximum Mission, Yohkoh, SoHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), Hinode, SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) and IRIS. Recent solar space observations have completely changed our view of the Sun.
Helen has always been keen to convey her passion for solar physics to the public and to young students. She has given many public lectures and worked closely with UK schools. She has participated in many radio and TV programmes, for example BBC4’s 'Seven Ages of Starlight'.
She has produced an educational web site for teachers and students (11-16 year old) called Sun|trek (www.suntrek.org) which is used extensively worldwide. In 2014, Helen was awarded an OBE for her services to Higher Education and to Women in Science, Engineering and Technology. In 2018, she was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Annie Maunder Medal for Outreach.
August 2018
August's tweets were by Dr Francesca Day. Fran is a theoretical physicist at DAMTP, and a Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse. Her research looks at using astrophysical observations to search for and constrain new particles. Fran is also a science comedian. During 2018, she is performing her one-woman show, Physics Fan Fiction, around the country, including at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.
July 2018
July's tweets were by Maurice Chiodo (Post-Doc in DPMMS, DoS at Kings, lectures in Formal Languages), and Piers Bursill-Hall (lectures in History of Mathematics).
They have an army of summer students working for them in July and August. Eight of these are working on a University funded project on ethics in mathematics, three are working on some problems in group theory, one each on a catalogue of 16th century development of mathematical symbols, maths and mathematical technology in sixteenth century ship building, and one on mathematics and technology in the medieval Hanseatic League. That is quite an army! Already, two weeks into these projects, and some astonishing progress has been made. Bright students doing interesting things: what could be a better way to spend the summer?
June 2018
June's tweets were by Adam Swinton. Adam is a 3rd year undergraduate maths student at Girton College, who will be graduating at the end of June. His interests are in probability and statistics and will, exam results permitting, be starting an MSc in Statistics at the University of Warwick in October. He's enjoyed his time studying at Cambridge, particularly being able to study courses across many different areas of maths.
May 2018
May's tweets were by Dr Lukas F. Lang (https://twitter.com/lukaslang). Lukas is a postdoctoral research associate at DAMTP and is part of the Cambridge Image Analysis research group, which is led by Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb. He received a PhD in Computational Science in 2015 from the University of Vienna, Austria, where he was supervised by Prof Otmar Scherzer and a member of the Computational Science Center (CSC) of the University of Vienna. Before starting at DAMTP he was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM), Austria. His research interests are mathematical image analysis, variational methods, and inverse problems.
April 2018
April's tweets were by Dr Joana Grah (https://twitter.com/joana_s_g). Joana is a research associate at the Alan Turing Institute in London. After finishing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mathematics, and briefly working as a scientific researcher in the Imaging workgroup led by Prof. Martin Burger at the University of Muenster in Germany, Joana started her PhD at DAMTP in 2014. Her work on mathematical imaging tools in cancer research was supervised by Dr Carola-Bibiane Schoenlieb, head of the Cambridge Image Analysis workgroup, and co-supervised by Dr Stefanie Reichelt, head of the Light Microscopy Core Facility at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.
March 2018
March's tweets were by Dr Stephen Eglen (https://twitter.com/StephenEglen). Stephen is a Reader in Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and member of the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute CCBI. He uses computational techniques to investigate development of the nervous system. He is also director of the MPhil in Computational Biology, and a Fellow of Magdalene College. Stephen's back for a second stint, having been our inaugural curator in June 2017.
January and February 2018
January and February 2018's tweets were by Dr Vivien Gruar. Vivien started as the Departmental Secretary (senior administrator) in DPMMS in April 2016. Her role is to make sure things keep ticking over in the Department so can involve anything from supporting the Head of Department and the Director of the Stats Lab with strategic and management issues to allocating office space for visitors! She is responsible for the Department's finances and managing the amazing staff that are the DPMMS admin team. This includes the Graduate Office which is one of the shared services between the two Departments in the Faculty of Maths.
Previously I worked in the University's Equality and Diversity team, primarily working to promote women in science and gender equality.
Born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland Vivien studied for a BSc in Biochemistry, Masters in Medical Science and PhD in Haematology all at Queens University Belfast. She has had a varied career path from a Lectureship in Haematology at Imperial College London to a Team Leader in a healthcare diagnostics company. For many years she was a cancer biology researcher and when she left academia it was to take up a role in Vitae, an organisation which supports the professional and career development of researchers. Many of her tweets will relate to both equality and diversity as well as researcher development and sometimes even Maths.
December 2017
December 2017's tweets were by Georgina Cronin. Georgina is the Research Support Librarian at the Betty & Gordon Moore Library, situated on the Centre for Mathematical Sciences site. As part of their support role, they teach mathematicians and other scientists across the University of Cambridge a whole range of things such as how to manage their research data, what tools to use to best communicate research topics to different audiences, and how to give really great presentations. All of Georgina's sessions are open to anyone who is interested from undergraduates all the way through to senior academic folk.
Many of the different research topics that Georgina teaches about can be found in a bitesize format through the YouTube series Moore Methods.
When they're not helping researchers do all what they need to do well, Georgina studies Environmental Science with the Open University, blogs about library things at Cardies and Tweed, and does fun things with stats with Cambridge's only roller derby league the Cambridge Rollerbillies!
November 2017
November 2017's tweets were by Dr Holly Krieger (https://twitter.com/hollykrieger). Born and raised near Chicago, Dr Holly Krieger spent the career-building years of her life in Chicago, Berkeley, and Cambridge USA. She completed the mathematics honors program with an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a developing interest in research in pure mathematics, particularly number theory. She went on to a master's degree and eventually a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Her initial research interests during graduate school were primarily in arithmetic and Diophantine geometry. When she learned of the exciting contemporaneous developments in applications of ergodic theory and dynamics to number theory, she turned her attention to dynamical systems and their connections to number theory. Under the exceptional guidance of complex dynamicist Laura DeMarco and automorphic forms specialist Ramin Takloo-Bighash, her thesis work focused on the emerging field of arithmetic dynamics, which studies the relationship between dynamics of one complex variable and the arithmetic geometry of abelian varieties.
She followed her PhD work with a 3-year NSF postdoctoral fellowship at MIT under the supervision of Bjorn Poonen, during which time she became particularly interested in the problem of unlikely intersections in complex dynamics. Since 2016, she has been a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge as well as the Corfield Fellow at Murray Edwards College.
October 2017
October 2017's tweets were retweets of @CambTweetMaths. #CambTweet is an initiative from Cambridge University Students' Union to showcase Cambridge University students' lives - warts and all! @CambTweetMaths is curated by a first year undergraduate student from Newnham College.
September 2017
September 2017's tweets were by Julia Hawkins. Julia is the Deputy Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project, which supports maths education for ages 3 to 19 and lifelong learning for the public. The project is a pioneering collaboration between the Faculties of Mathematics and Education, and our innovative free online resources reach millions of students and teachers each year.
August 2017
August 2017's tweets were by Professor Ben Allanach. Ben is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He works mostly on collider searches for new physics with other members of the Cambridge Supersymmetry Working Group, especially at the Large Hadron Collider.
To learn more about the kind of research Ben undertakes, watch his TEDx talk:
July 2017 - Dr Julia Goedecke
July 2017 tweets were by Dr Julia Goedecke (https://twitter.com/alqualin). Julia is Sheila Edmonds Lecturer in Mathematics and Director of Studies at Newnham College, as well as Graduate Education Officer and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. Her research is in Categorical Algebra, working on notions such as homology of algebraic objects using the abstract tools of Category Theory.
Julia is passionate about good teaching and supporing students from all backgrounds and any stage of their development, and also is involved in various outreach events.
June 2017 - Dr Stephen Eglen
June 2017 tweets were by Dr Stephen Eglen (https://twitter.com/StephenEglen). Stephen is a Reader in Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and member of the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute CCBI. He uses computational techniques to investigate development of the nervous system. He is also director of the MPhil in Computational Biology, and a Fellow of Magdalene College.