The formal MPE CDT programme has now to come to end. Our final event was held at Imperial College on 30 September. It was a very enjoyable day and we were delighted to be joined by so many former MPE students and staff. It was great to hear what everyone is doing and a wonderful opportunity to see people who, in some cases, had not met up in person since before the first lockdown.

Several of the MPE former students gave updates on their careers since they graduated from the CDT.

The afternoon was devoted to roundtable discussion groups that focussed on reviewing the students’ experiences of being a part of the MPE CDT and on looking forward to a future bid for a new CDT. It was great to hear how much the students had enjoyed and gained from their time at Imperial College and the University of Reading, and to obtain ideas and suggestions from both staff and former students that we will incorporate into the next CDT bid.

We all vowed to keep in touch in future and will be issuing news about how we will do this soon…..

The Demonstrator was made by Professor Onno Bokhove as part of the Data Assimilation for the REsilient City (DARE) research project and network funded by an EPSRC Senior Fellowship in Digital Technology for Living with Environmental Change. https://research.reading.ac.uk/dare/

Professor Bokhove said:
“Over the last 8 years I have had the pleasure to heavily interact with students and staff of the Mathematics of Planet Earth Centre for Doctoral Training (MPE CDT) on the mathematics and numerics of geophysical and environmental fluid dynamics, with applications in flooding, wave-energy and extreme water waves at sea. I have enjoyed reading CDT students’ reports as external examiner and facing critical questions in the various seminars given for the MPE CDT. In addition, whilst not on call to check on Wetropolis during the MPE exhibition, I loved exploring the river-scape of London’s Thames from Hammersmith to the Thames Barrier. Pondering how to make an urban-estuary version of Wetropolis in which river floods meet a tidal storm surge.” 

The video of the “Exploring Wetropolis, an extreme rainfall and flood demonstrator”, part of Reading’s DARE project and featuring Oliver Phillips (MPE CDT PhD student) and Onno, underscores the fruitful collaborations between the Universities of Leeds and Reading and Imperial College London:

The video can be viewed here:

Read the full blog here:

Cathie has provided this summary:

In the SIAM Online article we look at different ways to plan flight trajectories across the North Atlantic, between John F Kennedy Airport in New York (JFK) and London Heathrow Airport (LHR), in order to reduce CO₂ emissions. With commercial aviation currently responsible for 5% of all anthropogenic climate change, it is important that we find immediate ways to reduce aviation fuel use and thus emissions. This is offered by improved trajectory planning, taking advantage of wind conditions and a new satellite communications network.

We consider the problem through the framing of Optimal Control Theory and use two different ways to reach a solution.  In the first instance time minimal trajectories at fixed altitude and airspeed are considered, enabling the corresponding optimal control problem to be solved using Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle. This method relies on optimisation of the initial system, before discretisation to allow for an approximate numerical solution. When looking at fuel optimisation for a fixed-time flight, we instead discretise the system first and find the control variables which give the minimum value of a cost functional at each time interval, subject to a non-linear constraint.  From these the corresponding states of a fuel minimal trajectory can be retrieved.

Using time minimal optimisation we show that large savings in emissions are possible by changing to trajectory based operations, compared with the current tactic of limiting aircraft to the Organised Track Structure. Research into different formulations of fuel-optimal routing highlights the importance of controlling both airspeed and heading angle, rather than just heading angle.

To this end, the workshop will focus on two main themes:

• Turbulence on day 1 
• Dynamics and Transfer Operator Theory on day 2 .  

Topics of the conference include:

• Out-of-equilibrium dynamics
• Spatio-temporal chaos
• Periodic Orbit Theory
• Critical transitions (tipping points) in high-dimensional systems
• Rare, extreme and persistent events and large deviations.

This conference to be in-person and there will also be the opportunity to register for online attendance. 

The conference will include poster sessions and social events. Applications are particularly encouraged from early career researchers and PhD students.

More information, including details about registration, are here.

Geophysical fluid dynamics; from mathematical theory to operational prediction

at University of Reading

A month-long programme of talks, activities and workshops

A better understanding of the climate system is of great societal relevance, due to the importance of reliable environmental forecasts and the looming climate crisis. Recent scientific progress ranges from improving operational forecasting systems to abstract results on infinite dynamical systems. it is of vital importance to bring theses insights together in a proper interdisciplinary environment, which this programme aims to provide. With a focus on the fluid dynamical components of the climate system, practitioners will learn from mathematicians and statisticians about new tools and techniques to analyse these, while at the same time interesting new challenges for the mathematical community will emerge. The programme will address questions relating to geophysical fluid dynamics and forecasting, such as qualitative and statistical behaviour of geophysical models, response to deterministic and stochastic perturbations, sources of predictability at different spatial and temporal scales, forecast verification, and data assimilation. We will be taking both mathematical and statistical perspectives as well as applied and operational perspectives at the same time.

Full details, including how to take part, are here: here.

This year the chapter conference is happening in person again (fingers crossed), and in addition to three senior speakers we will also host student speakers, so if you want to take the chance and present your work at this year’s conference, feel free to fill out the form or contact us personally.

Full details and information on how to register are here: https://www.reading.ac.uk/maths/siamstudentchapter/

NOW THAT THIS CONFERENCE HAS TAKEN PLACE – WE WOULD LIKE TO CONGRATULATE ALL THE SPEAKERS AND ORGANISERS FOR A BRILLIANT CONFERENCE.

THE AWARDS FOR THE BEST EARLY CAREER TALKS – SELECTED BY SECRET BALLOT DURING THE CONFERENCE – WERE GIVEN TO ERIN RUSSELL AND CATHIE WELLS

COPIES OF ALL OF THE PRESENTATIONS HAVE BEEN UPLOADED BELOW:

To coincide with the International Celebration of Women in Mathematics, the London Mathematical Society, the Mathematics of Planet Earth CDT and the University of Reading presented a day with invited guest speakers:

• Renee Hoekzema (Postdoctoral Researcher, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford)
• Hua Lu (Research Scientist, Atmosphere Ice and Climate, the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge)
• Celine Maistret (Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, School of Mathematics, University of Bristol)
• Almut Veraart (Professor of Statistics, Imperial College London)
• plus posters and talks from Early Career Mathematicians.

The hosts of the meeting were Jennifer Scott (Professor of Mathematics at University of Reading and Director at Reading, of the Mathematics of Planet Earth Centre for Doctoral Training); and Rachel Newton (Reader in Number Theory and Future Leaders Fellow, King’s College London).

This celebration of Women in Mathematics event is sponsored by the London Mathematical Society and the EPSRC Mathematics of Planet Earth Centre for Doctoral Training and was a hybrid event, free of charge.

Although celebrating Women in Mathematics, EVERYONE WAS WELCOME TO ATTEND (including undergraduate students) and the talks were aimed at those with an interest in mathematics.

Venue: Edith Morley Van Emden Theatre, Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading – directions available here.

INVITED SPEAKERS:

Renee Hoekzema

Dr Renee Hoekzema is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. Her research spans fundamental problems in topology such as describing manifold invariants, and applications of topology to biomedicine, palaeontology, and physics.

Renee grew up in the Netherlands where she obtained a double MSc degree in mathematics and theoretical physics from Utrecht University. She also completed a minor degree in palaeobiology and continued to do two subsequent DPhil’s at the University of Oxford, one in palaeontology and one in algebraic topology. After this varied education she continued as a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at the University of Copenhagen and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, before returning to Oxford as a postdoctoral research associate studying both topology and its applications to bioscience. She holds a Veni Fellowship in the Netherlands combining mathematics and its applications.

Hua Lu is a research scientist in the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). She researches atmospheric dynamics, temperature trends and extreme weather in the Antarctic, and solar influences on atmospheric circulation. She is currently working on a NERC-funded multi-centre project: North Atlantic Climate System Integrated Study (ACSIS) to investigate influence of the upper atmosphere on changes that occur across the North Atlantic and examine how those changes may affect the UK’s climate and weather.

Céline Maistret works in Number Theory, mainly studying the arithmetic of abelian varieties, with interest toward computations related to the parity conjecture and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.   She received her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2017 and was a research associate at the University of Bristol before joining Boston University as a postdoctoral faculty fellow. Since January 2021, she is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the University of Bristol.

Almut Veraart is Professor of Statistics at Imperial College London, where she is also leading the Quantitative Sciences Research Institute. Her research focuses on developing statistical tools for a wide range of stochastic processes and (spatio-temporal) random fields and on tackling applications in finance, energy systems and environmental sciences. She grew up in Germany and obtained a “Diplom” in Mathematics and Economics and a “Diplom” in Mathematics from the University of Ulm. She also holds an MSc in Applied Statistics and a DPhil in Statistics from the University of Oxford where here studies were supported by a Rhodes Scholarship. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher and later assistant professor at the Centre for Research in Econometric Analysis of Time Series (CREATES) at Aarhus University in Denmark, before being appointed at the Department of Mathematics at Imperial in 2011. She held visiting research fellowships at Aarhus University, the University of Oslo, the Wolfgang Pauli Institute in Vienna and at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. Her research has been supported by the European Commission, by the Lloyds Register Foundation – Turing Programme on Data Centric Engineering and by EDF.

Programme and Presentations:

Here are post-conference copies of the presentations given:

10.55   Welcoming remarks, Jennifer Scott, Professor and Director at Reading, Mathematics of Planet Earth Centre for Doctoral Training

11.05   Invited Talk: Almut Veraart, Professor of Statistics, Imperial College London

Title: My journey into academia and A short introduction to Ambit Stochastics

Abstract: In this talk I am going to describe my journey into academia and give a short, non-technical introduction to the area of Ambit Stochastics.
The term Ambit Stochastics indicates a broad field of mathematical research with applications in a wide range of subject areas belonging to natural science, economics, and biology/medicine. Key examples of applications are to the modelling of turbulent flows, the modelling of financial energy markets and the modelling of biological growth. Ambit Stochastics deals with the study of random objects whose properties depend on time and spatial position (or any other type of variables). The variability in space and time is controlled through specific regions in space and time, the so-called ambit sets, and encompasses additional basic stochastic variation, the so-called intermittency/volatility. This approach is very general and comprises the basic idea of a causality cone in the past that is fundamental in physics. Accordingly, Ambit Stochastics has the potential to be applied in many fields of sciences where the variability at a certain point can be partly traced back to what happened in a region associated to this point. The initialising example for the application of Ambit Stochastics to real phenomena is turbulence. Over the past few years, a unifying modelling framework has been developed that is able to capture the main stylised features of turbulent flows. The mathematical research in this direction has matured to a stage where more extensive data acquisition, analysis and comparison is called for. This constitutes an exciting interplay between theory and experiment, typical for the development of the whole field of Ambit Stochastics.

11.40   Comfort Break

11.55   Invited Talk: Céline Maistret, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, School of Maths, University of Bristol

Title: Elliptic curves and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture

Abstract:  Number theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with studying numbers and solving equations. This talk will address the latter by introducing a particular set of equations which define objects called elliptic curves. Solving these equations has proven extremely difficult due to their complex mathematical structure. The quest for their solutions started over a century ago and reached a milestone in the 1960’s when Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer proposed a formula to find all their solutions. In this talk, I will present the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and explain how it allows to find all solutions. 

12.30   Poster Blitz (1 slide introductions for each poster)

12.45   Lunch and poster session

Ruth Chapman, University of Exeter: Stochastic data adapted Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation box models

Lily Greig, University of Reading: Comparison of a simplified ERSEM to a full complexity model for the North-West European Shelf

Yu Kuang, non-affiliated: The Hermitian-Galois Module Structure of the Square Root

Evelyn Lira-Torres, Queen Mary University of London: Quantum Gravity and Riemannian Geometry on the Fuzzy Square

Marica Minucci, Queen Mary University of London: The Maxwell-Scalar Field System Near Spatial Infinity

Cathie Wells, University of Reading: Re-routing Transatlantic Flights to reduce CO2 Emissions:

13.50   Invited Talk: Hua Lu, Research Scientist (Atmosphere Ice and Climate), British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge

Title: How Maths Helped One to Become a Polar Researcher

Abstract: In this talk, I shall take you with me to go through my journey from a mathematician to a polar researcher. I will share with you the fun and cool moments being a research mathematician who uses equations, data, and statistics to tackle real world problems. I shall explain how maths has helped me to overcome challenges of having to move from one research field to another. I shall give you examples of why maths has formed the corner stone of my multi-disciplinary research. Because the environment topics that we face now-a-days so complex, dispersed and infused into various other disciplinary courses, I shall use my own experiences to demonstrate the value of working with people from different background and with different research expertise to ensure successful collaboration and project delivery.

14.25   Early Career Talks (3 x 15 minutes each):

Swinda Falkena, University of Reading: A Bayesian Approach to Regime Assignment

Lea Oljaca, University of Exeter: Measure and Statistical Attractors for nonautonomous Dynamical Systems

Farhana Pramy, The Open University: Properties of the Eigenfunctions of the SFS Operator with \alpha=0

15.10   Refreshment Break

15.25   Early Career Talks (2 x 15 minutes each)

Silvia Rognone, Queen Mary University of London: Characterisation of structures emerging from Random Colouring Processes on a Spatial Graph.

Erin Russell, University of Bristol: Playing with Fire: The Necessary Evil of Self-organized Criticality

15.55 Vote for best Early Career Presenter

16.00   Invited Talk: Renee Hoekzema, Postdoctoral Researcher, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford

Title: Cutting and pasting in the 21^st century

Abstract: Scissor’s congruence is a classical setup in mathematics that featured in one of Hilbert’s problems in 1900. It asks whether two polytopes can be obtained from one another through a process of cutting and pasting. In the 1970s this question was posed instead for smooth manifolds: which manifolds A and B can be related to one another by cutting A into pieces and gluing them back together to get B? Manifold cut-and-paste invariants describe when this is possible. In this talk I introduce this these ideas and describe recent work that ‘upgrades’ cut-and-paste invariants to spaces using the machinery from algebraic K-theory. This is joint work with Mona Merling, Laura Murray, Carmen Rovi and Julia Semikina.

16.35   Closing remarks – here are two more conferences coming up:

Congratulations to all the speakers for a brilliant conference. The awards for the best Early Career Talks were given to Erin Russell and Cathie Wells.

The Smith Institute explains:

“Established in 2011, the Smith Institute’s annual TakeAIM competition is an opportunity for university students to showcase their work on the industrial stage. TakeAIM’s goal is to highlight the crucial role mathematics plays in solving real-world problems while rewarding the academic exploration of future innovators who undertake pioneering research.”

“From medicine to manufacturing, security to social media, mathematics is evolving to play an increasingly fundamental role in the way we live. It is the fresh imagination and insights of young mathematical scientists that help to understand and predict the behaviour of physical, biological, and social systems in today’s ever-changing world.”

TakeAIM 2021 Winners

The Smith Institute announced the winners of the 2021 competition: “We’d like to thank all those who submitted an entry – the standard was incredibly high. The Smith Institute and our TakeAIM sponsors (Sembcorp Energy UK, Dyson, NAG, Syngenta, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), EPSRC and DeepMind) are delighted to announce the following prize winners:

• 1st prize: Cathie Wells (Tracking the sustainability of long haul flights).”

Read more about the announcement on the Smith Institute’s website here: https://www.smithinst.co.uk/takeaim/

Programme:

Coffee and Tea available from 10.30

11.00: Welcome from Jennifer Scott

11.00-11.45  Dr Samuel Hatfield, ECMWF (Chaired by Jennifer Scott)

‘Millibars and Megabytes’  
Over the past 40 years there has been a monumental increase in the accuracy of weather forecasts, fuelled by supercomputing technology. Nowadays, by simulating the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and other natural systems on these supercomputers, we are able to predict the tracks of hurricanes and other storms even 8 days ahead. Such high accuracy forecasts have demonstrable value to a global society more and more exposed to the extreme weather of a changing climate. In this talk I will discuss the key advances in supercomputing that allowed these developments in Earth-system simulation science, and what further advances we can expect as supercomputing technology continues to evolve into the future.  

…
 

12.00-12.45  Dr Christopher Maynard, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Reading and The Met Office (Chaired by Jochen Broecker)

‘The challenge of weather and climate prediction on the next generation of supercomputer’  

Improvements in the accuracy of weather forecasts and climate model predictions rely, at least in part, on improvements to computational speed of supercomputers. However, inter-generational processor speed increases ceased in the late nineties. Since then, gains in computational performance have come from exploiting parallelism in computation, i.e. doing multiple things at once. However, power constraints have forced processors to become ever more parallel. Moreover, even complex, heterogeneous architectures in supercomputer nodes such as CPU+GPU are now becoming common. How can we develop scientific software when the underlying computer architectures and programming models change more rapidly than model development? In this talk I will detail the approach the Met Office taking to developing new weather and climate models for future supercomputers. 

…

12.45-14.00 Lunch – room 111 The Palmer Building

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14.00-14.45  Dr Joanne Waller, The Met Office (Chaired by Colin Cotter)

‘Can we handle spatial observation error correlations in atmospheric data assimilation?’  

Over the last 10 years the use of inter-channel correlations in data assimilation has resulted in improved weather forecasts. However, despite the existence of significant spatial error correlations they are not yet widely accounted for in atmospheric data assimilation. This presentation will consider how we can handle these spatial error correlations. First, the importance and expected benefits of including spatial error correlations will be discussed. Next, potential methodology for handling spatial correlations will be presented along with some of the technical challenges that still remain. Finally, we present results that show the impact of assimilating Doppler radar radial wind observations when explicitly accounting for the correlated observation errors. We conclude that, though some technical challenges remain, we are able to handle some spatial observation error correlations, and the benefits of this are beginning to emerge. 

…

15.00 Closing remarks, Dan Crisan

…..