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Applied Mathematics

Bristol has always maintained the important connection between theory and experiment. It is one of the few mathematics departments that has its own experimental laboratory.

The department is also a leader in scientific computing and has helped ensure a significant investment by the University in high-performance computing. This project is led by Prof. Steve Wiggins.

The Applied Mathematics group encourages close collaboration with other departments, such as aerospace, civil engineering, physics and earth sciences, and with external bodies.

For example, materials science researchers are currently working with Hewlett Packard to mathematically model bi-stable liquid crystal displays (LCDs) which would require a voltage to change their display state but not to maintain it.

Drop singularity

Study of drop formation is led by Prof. Jens Eggers.

Fluid dynamics


Bristol has a long and illustrious history in fluid dynamics, starting in the 1940s when the group was established by Prof. Leslie Howarth. The fluids group has seen great successes, with the work of Professors Philip Drazin, Howell Peregrine, David Evans and many others. Today, it continues to grow with new staff members working in contact lines, drops, vortices and non-Newtonian fluids.

The increasing miniaturisation of microprocessors according to Moore's Law means that in 10 to 15 years chips will be operating at the quantum level even at room temperature. The transistors that make up a processor will be not much larger than molecules and the movement of individual electrons will be the basis of computation.

Microlaser mode

Microlaser mode, studied by the quantum chaos group and featured in Physical Review A.

Quantum mechanics


Bristol is a world leader in quantum mathematics. The research covers quantum chaos, quantum information and random matrix theory and will be used, for example, to model the complex quantum relationships in tomorrow's computer chips, microlasers and nanoscale systems.

New results in dynamical systems, meanwhile, have offered insight into previously hopeless problems. Researchers at Bristol have been able to explain how the giant planets trapped their moons, and offer solutions for mixing fluids at the scales of microns.



Local news

27 June 2012
Marco Leoni was a finalist for the 10th Osborne Reynolds Research Student Award which is awarded by the European Research Community on Flow, Turbulence and Combustion (ERCOFTAC) for the best doctoral dissertation in fluid mechanics in the UK for his work on "Order and hydrodynamic fluctuations in active suspensions".

30 April 2012
Nick Simm receives a Faculty of Science commendation for his doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Francesco Mezzadri.

30 April 2012
Marco Leoni receives a Faculty of Science commendation for his doctoral dissertation on "Order and hydrodynamic fluctuations in active suspensions" which was written under the supervision of Tannie Liverpool.

27 April 2012
Dan Lucas begins a postdoc with Rich Kerswell on periodic orbits as a basis for fluid turbulence.

20 April 2012
Rich Kerswell elected as Fellow of the Royal Society: Rich Kerswell has been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society. The Royal Society is the national academy of science of the UK and the Commonwealth, and the fellowships are offered to the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists.

30 October 2011
New artificial protein structure: A new, artificial protein structure has been made by a team of University of Bristol chemists, biochemists and a mathematician, Noah Linden. The protein has 6 polypeptide chains that the team designed from first principles (i.e., they take inspiration from biology but are not based on or related to any one particular natural protein). This is interesting because nature appears not to have used this structure, or at least its natural analogues have not yet been observed.

13 May 2011
EPSRC has funded Valeriy Slastikov's First Grant Proposal on "Analysis of Liquid Crystal Models" to study phase transitions and, formation and evolution of singularities and defects in nematic liquid crystals.

21 April 2011
530,000 pounds to study Icelandic volcano: Eyjafjallajokull, the Icelandic volcano that grounded air traffic across Europe last year, is the subject of a new research project which involves Andrew Hogg and is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. Satellite data will be used to develop new algorithms for detecting and quantifying the microphysical properties of volcanic ash. Then the transition from initial eruption column to layered downwind cloud will be modelled.

4 March 2011
Elisabetta Flora, a Masters student from the University of Padua is visiting Tannie Liverpool until the summer and will be working on spontaneous symmetry breaking in driven non-equilibrium systems.

1 March 2011
Chris Johnson begins a postdoc with Andy Hogg on density-driven environmental flows.

15 February 2011
EPSRC has funded Karoline Wiesner's First Grant Proposal on "Quantum computation in complex biological systems" to study the synergy of the mathematics of complex systems and quantum information. The proposal aims to advance the theory of quantum optimal predictors by joining quantum information and complex systems theory. The aim is to identify macroscopic quantum effects and the quantum mechanisms in the behavior of complex biological systems.

1 February 2011
Chiara Liverani who recently graduated with a degree in physics from the University of Bologna is visiting Isaac Chenchiah and Jonathan Robbins till May.

3 September 2010
Press release: Is there a minimum size below which no refrigerator can work? Noah Linden, Sandu Popescu and Paul Skrzypczyk have found there is no minimum size, and, using quantum mechanics, designed what is arguably the smallest possible refrigerator. It works extremely well too: it can cool arbitrarily close to absolute zero.

23 August 2010
Press release: The Peregrine soliton, discovered over 25 years ago by the late Howell Peregrine (1938-2007) who was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol, has been observed in a continuous physical system for the first time. The Peregrine solution is of great physical significance because its intense localisation has led it to be proposed as a prototype of ocean rogue waves responsible for many maritime catastrophes.

2 July 2010
Professor Jon Keating FRS, the dean of Science, has been awarded the Froehlich Prize by the London Mathematical Society in recognition of his seminal work on the modelling of zeta-functions via random matrix theory.

1 July 2010
Rhoda Hawkins begins a 2-year postdoc with Tannie Liverpool.

18 May 2010
Gary Chandler begins a 3-year EPSRC-funded project on "Periodic Orbits in Fluid Turbulence" with Rich Kerswell. Gary did his PhD at Cambridge University with Dr Matt Juniper.

18 May 2010
Laurent Lacaze, CNRS, IMFT, Toulouse is visiting Jerry Phillips and Rich Kerswell from 18 to 21 May.

3 May 2010
M. Cristina Marchetti, Department of Physics, Syracuse University is visiting Tannie Liverpool from 3 to 7 May.

20 April 2010
Francesco Mezzadri has been promoted to Reader with effect from 1st August 2010.

7 December 2009
Press release: Rio Yokota wins a Gordon Bell prize at SC09. The Gordon Bell prizes are prestigious awards that recognise outstanding achievement in high-performance computing, particularly advances in peak performance, cost performance, and innovative techniques.

25 November 2009
Jens Eggers elected fellow of the American Physical Society for his work on "applications of the ideas of singularities to free-boundary problems such as jet breakup, drop formation, air entrainment, thin-film dynamics including wetting, dewetting and contact line motions, and with further applications to polymeric flows and models for granular dynamics."

13 November 2009
Reza Pakzad, Department of Mathematics, University of Pittsburgh visits Isaac Chenchiah.

10 November 2009
Press release: Aram Harrow has discovered a quantum algorithm that solves linear equations much faster than classical algorithms can.

29 October 2009
Duc Khiem Huynh successfully defended his PhD thesis on random matrix theory and elliptic curve L-functions.

26 August 2009
Oliver Gray who works on Mathematical Physics / String Theory and Liza Jones who works on Probability and Random Matrix Theory will begin as Heilbronn Fellows on 1 September 2009.