Bio
– John Henry Newman
Research Fellow
In October 2022, I returned to the University of St Andrews, first as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, and now as an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellow.
I represent the University of St Andrews as a member of the General Committee of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.
I was awarded the Reinhold Baer Prize (2024) from AGTA for my paper on the maximal size of a minimal generating set of a finite group [Forum Math. Sigma (2023)].
I taught the Advanced Group Theory course in 2022–23, and I organised the Pure Mathematics Colloquium that same year.
Heilbronn Research Fellow
From 2019 to 2022, I was a Heilbronn Research Fellow based at the University of Bristol. I spent chunks of time visiting the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge for the programme on Groups, representations and applications.
In January 2021, I organised a Focussed Research Workshop on Generating Thompson Groups sponsored by the Heilbronn Institute. I also organised the Algebra Seminar for the two years 2020–22.
I was awarded the Gold Medal in the Mathematical Sciences at STEM for Britain (2021) when I presented my research to MPs and Lords. Since then I have been a member of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee and have written for their newsletter Science in Parliament.
I was a plenary speaker at Groups St Andrews in Newcastle in 2022 and a survey article based on my talk will appear in the proceedings of the conference (a preprint is available at arxiv:2210.09635). The long history of this conference series is documented on MacTutor here.
I taught half of the Topics in Discrete Mathematics course in 2020–21, and organised numerous outreach activities.
LMS Early Career Fellow
For the summer of 2019, I visited Andrea Lucchini at the University of Padua with an Early Career Fellowship from the London Mathematical Society.
University of Bristol
From 2015 to 2019, I was a PhD student at the University of Bristol, funded by an EPSRC studentship and a Heilbronn Excellence Award. My PhD supervisor was Tim Burness, which places me in this mathematical family tree. My PhD thesis, entitled “On the spread of classical groups”, was awarded a Faculty of Science commendation, as an outstanding piece of work.
During my PhD, I was awarded the Cecil King Travel Scholarship (2017) by the London Mathematical Society, which funded visits to University of Auckland and the University of Western Australia. (Further information on the history of this award can be found on page 22 of the September 2012 LMS newsletter.)
University of St Andrews
From 2011 to 2015, I was an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews, studying for an MMath degree in this beautiful seaside town. I was financially supported by the Ernst Scheller III Memorial Scholarship (2011) from Silberline. I won the Sanderson Prize (2015) as top mathematics undergraduate, the Arthur Hinton Read Prize (2015) and Alexander Stewart Prize (2014) for best performance in pure mathematics and 8 further prizes including the Class Medals each year.
During my degree, I undertook a summer research project on averages distances and higher moments of selfsimilar sets with selfsimilar measures, i.e. “throwing darts at fractals”, which led to the paper [Math Z. (2016)].
My final-year project on the Mathieu Groups was supervised by Colva Roney-Dougal and it won the Duncan Prize (2015).