Annual Report 2017-2018
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Annual Review 2017 | 2018 ONTENTS C 1 Overview 1 2 Profile 4 3 Research 6 4 Events 9 5 Personnel 13 6 Mentoring 17 7 Structures 18 APPENDICES R1 Highlighted Papers 20 R2 Complete List of Papers 23 E1 HIMR-run Events 29 E2 HIMR-sponsored Events 31 E3 Focused Research Events 39 E4 Future Events 54 P1 Fellows Joining in 2017|2018 59 P2 Fellows Leaving since September 2017 60 P3 Fellows Moving with 3-year Extensions 62 P4 Future Fellows 63 M1 Mentoring Programme 64 1. Overview This has been another excellent year for the Heilbronn Institute, which is now firmly established as a major national mathematical research centre. HIMR has developed a strong brand and is increasingly influential in the UK mathematics community. There is currently an outstanding cohort of Heilbronn Research Fellows doing first-rate research. Recruitment of new Fellows has been most encouraging, as is the fact that many distinguished academic mathematicians continue to work with the Institute. The research culture at HIMR is excellent. Members have expressed a high level of satisfaction. This is especially the case with the Fellows, many of whom have chosen to continue their relationships with the Institute. Our new Fellows come from leading mathematics departments and have excellent academic credentials. Those who left have moved to high-profile groups, including several to permanent academic positions. We currently have 29 Fellows, hosted by 6 universities. We are encouraged by the fact that of the 9 Fellows joining us this year, 5 are women. The achievements of our Fellows this year again range from winning prestigious prizes to publishing in the elite mathematical journals and organising major mathematical meetings. Annual Review | October 2017 – September 2018 Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research www.heilbronn.ac.uk Page|1 There has been a considerable increase over the past three years in the number of PhD students supported by HIMR. We now support 10, and are pleased that 7 are women. Members of HIMR produced over 50 papers on their external research during the review period. This corresponds to roughly 1.6 papers per person, which compares favourably with expectations. Many of these papers are of a highly impressive quality. Publications appeared in a wide range of leading international journals. Work at HIMR is having a significant impact on Mathematics. The external events organised by the Institute have been extremely successful, with a number of exceptionally high quality Conferences, Workshops, and Focused Research Events. These included two major international meetings, one on Probability, Analysis and Dynamics and a second on the Riemann Hypothesis, which attracted the leading international researchers in their respective areas. The 2018 Annual Conference also featured a number of world-leading mathematicians. Last year we supported 37 events, taking place across the UK, more than ever before. Annual Review | October 2017 – September 2018 Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research www.heilbronn.ac.uk Page|2 HIMR works closely with other major UK and international mathematics research institutes and organisations, including the American Institute of Mathematics, the Clay Mathematics Institute, the Alan Turing Institute, the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, the Isaac Newton Institute, and the London Mathematical Society. In collaboration with the Clay Mathematics Institute we are currently establishing a new series of Postgraduate Summer Schools, which will start in 2019. As other funding agencies are increasingly promoting applied and interdisciplinary research, and/or narrowing their focus, HIMR is playing a significant and visible role in supporting a broad spectrum of UK Mathematics and Early-Career Mathematicians. The academic community continues to value this highly. HIMR is taking a leadership role with regard to several issues that are currently important to the UK mathematics community, including Knowledge Exchange and Impact. The Institute was held up as an example of best practice in the Independent Review of Knowledge Exchange in the Mathematical Sciences in the UK (The Era of Mathematics) led by Professor Philip Bond. One of the key recommendations of the review was that the idea of establishing more institutes based on the HIMR model should be explored. The team at the University of Bristol that is responsible for HIMR’s external activities continues to make an outstanding contribution to the Institute’s development. The quality of HIMR’s external activities and the visibility given to the external achievements of HIMR members contribute in a significant way to the Institute’s success by enhancing its attractiveness to the most able academic mathematicians. Annual Review | October 2017 – September 2018 Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research www.heilbronn.ac.uk Page|3 2. Profile HIMR’s reputation in the academic community is now well established. The successes of the Fellows and the quality of the external events supported by the Institute are widely appreciated. This is evidenced by the continuing increase in applications for Fellowships, participation in HIMR events, and requests for HIMR support, and by the quality of our partnerships and our involvement in major national mathematical initiatives. The Focused Research Grant Scheme offers a distinctive funding opportunity that is highly valued. We received many excellent proposals again last year and were able to be highly selective. Those we funded are listed in Appendix E3. The reports we have received suggest that the events were highly successful. Conversations across the UK academic mathematics community have indicated strong support for HIMR. In particular, the Institute received numerous approaches to partner in proposals to EPSRC to run Centres for Doctoral Training. We selected five bids to support. The Institute was held up as an example of best practice in the Independent Review of Knowledge Exchange in the Mathematical Sciences in the UK (The Era of Mathematics) led by Professor Philip Bond. One of the key recommendations of the review was that the idea of establishing more institutes based on the HIMR model should be explored. Annual Review | October 2017 – September 2018 Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research www.heilbronn.ac.uk Page|4 We have continued to collaborate with the American Institute of Mathematics, the Clay Mathematics Institute, the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, the Isaac Newton Institute, the London Mathematical Society, and the Alan Turing Institute, for example in jointly running or co-funding events (see Section 4 for further details). In partnership with the Clay Institute we are establishing a major new series of Postgraduate Summer Schools, starting in 2019. We have also developed plans to collaborate with the Alan Turing Institute so that Heilbronn Fellows working in the area of Data Science can carry out their external research there. HIMR has developed plans to establish a new facility in Manchester to support our collaborations with the university there and other universities nearby. We are encouraged by the way the University of Manchester has worked in partnership with us in this initiative. We are increasingly involved in advocacy for UK Mathematics and have a unique vantage point from which to comment. For example, we play a lead role in the STEM for Britain poster competition in Parliament. We were also invited to have high-level involvement in the Review of Knowledge Exchange in the Mathematical Sciences referred to above, and we met with the Chief Executive of UKRI to discuss the HIMR model. Annual Review | October 2017 – September 2018 Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research www.heilbronn.ac.uk Page|5 3. Research One of the primary aims of the Heilbronn Institute is to support the external research of its members by providing a stimulating environment and appropriate opportunities. We attract excellent mathematicians and enable them to carry out excellent research. A natural measure of the Institute’s performance in relation to this goal is therefore the quality of the papers produced by its members. Members of the Institute produced 54 papers last year. This is a healthy average rate of production: over 1.6 papers per person per year. (The corresponding figure last year was roughly 1.8.). The papers identified by members as their best are listed in appendix R1. The complete set of papers is listed in Appendix R2. In the year under review, members of the Institute have published papers in Biometrika, Communications in Mathematical Physics, Duke Mathematical Journal, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, and Physical Review Letters. A paper published by one of the Heilbronn Fellows, solving a problem raised by Serre, was the subject of an article in Quanta Magazine in which Professor Kiran Kedlya, a highly distinguished US mathematician, described it as a “watershed moment”. Annual Review | October 2017 – September 2018 Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research www.heilbronn.ac.uk Page|6 Citations represent a more objective but less reliable method for assessing research in Pure Mathematics. Whilst citation numbers do not really measure quality, they can be said to correlate (crudely) with visibility. In Pure Mathematics one cannot use citation counts to measure the performance of individuals, but they can be useful in picking out trends for groups of researchers. To this end, we note that citations in 2015 to papers listing HIMR as the address of one or more authors (and some members do not to use this address, especially those in London, so inevitably a number of papers are missed) were 113% higher than in 2014. The corresponding citation count for 2016 was in turn 43% higher than in 2015, and in 2017 it was 16% higher than in 2016. It is too early to give a definitive citation count for 2018, but extrapolating current trends suggests that this growth will be maintained. Again, we remark that the numbers are relatively small and one should not read too much into their actual size, but the trend continues to be encouraging.