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Ulrike Tillmann is a mathematician who has worked in topology, K- theory, and non-commutative geometry. Her well-known work on moduli spaces has been motivated by problems in quantum physics and string theory, while some of her recent work in applied topology addresses challenges in data science.
Born in Germany, Tillmann attended her local grammar school. With the help of a Wien Scholarship she studied at Brandeis University and later received her PhD from Stanford University. Following a post-doctoral position in Cambridge she spent most of her career in Oxford and Merton College. For her outstanding research, Tillmann was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the LMS in 2004, the Bessel– Humboldt Forschungs Preis in 2008, elected an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 and a Member of the Leopoldina in 2017. She was a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and the inaugural chair of its Programme Committee at its establishment in 2015. For the term 2022-24, she served as President of the London Mathematical Society (LMS).
Currently she is the Rothschild & Sons Professor in Cambridge, Director of the Isaac Newton Institute, and Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU). She also serves on scientific boards of several international institutions, including, the Fields Institute (Toronto), the Leibniz Preis (DFG) and the Expert Panel of the Excellence Initiative (Expertengremium zur Exzellenzstrategie), a joint initiative of the German government and national science foundation. A former member of Council of the Royal Society 2017-20 during which time she also served as interim Vice-President, she has chaired the Royal Society's Education Committee since 2020.
Kat is an Innovation Research Associate at the University of Warick, and digital maths communicator. She has been sharing her passion for mathematics on the livestreaming platform Twitch for over five years, an endeavour she started whilst completing her PhD in applied mathematics. A strong advocate for transparency in higher education, she is Lead on ResearchYourWay, an initiative that is building off the four year successful PhDYourWay annual webinar, which centers PhD experiences to help people find their personal path through the research career landscape.
Christopher Hollings is Associate Professor of the History of Mathematics at the Oxford Mathematical Institute, and Clifford Norton Senior Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics at The Queen's College. He is a member of the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, and is also currently President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics.
Laura Black is a Professor in the Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester. Laura's research interests focus on inequalities and social justice in education, particularly in relation to mathematics within and beyond school settings. She is especially interested in Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), conceptualisations of identity as mediated by pedagogic practices, the production and exchange of capital (drawing on Bourdieu), and the use and exchange value attached to mathematics. While these theoretical perspectives are often used to examine students’ experiences of alienation from ‘schoolified’ mathematics, they also highlight possibilities for development through activism and social movements that seek to redefine relationships between schools and communities. In this context, Laura has utilised and critiqued the Funds of Knowledge approach, which challenges deficit assumptions by designing curriculum projects grounded in the rich resources of students’ homes and communities. More recently, she has joined the Very Local Maths project, which works with local youth groups to co-create projects that combine art and mathematics, further developing the concept of the community mathematician.
Melanie Rupflin is a professor at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Trinity College. Her research focuses on geometric analysis, especially the quantitative analysis of geometric flows, variational problems and PDEs. She studied mathematics at ETH Zurich, where she also completed her PhD, and had postdoc positions at the universities of Warwick and Leipzig, as well as at the MPI in Potsdam before moving to Oxford. Alongside her research, she enjoys teaching courses in Analysis at both undergraduate and graduate level.
Claire studied general Engineering at the University of Cambridge, specialising in geotechnical and environmental engineering. From there, she moved into the banking sector, spending 5 years working for Barclays Corporate Bank. Wishing to return to her mathematical roots, she studied for a PGCE at the IoE in London, before embarking on her first teaching job at St Helen and St Katherine School in Abingdon in 2005. She is currently Head of Mathematics at Magdalen College School in Oxford, where she has worked since 2011.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is the government authority responsible for protecting the UK from cyber threats. It supports businesses, public bodies, and individuals by providing guidance, incident response, threat intelligence, and technical standards to improve national cyber resilience. Mathematics underpins much of the NCSC’s work: cryptography relies on number theory, algebra, and probability; risk modelling uses statistics; and detecting cyber attacks involves algorithms, graph theory, and optimisation. Mathematical thinking is central to designing secure systems, analysing vulnerabilities, and understanding adversarial behaviour in cyberspace.
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