The Alan Turing Institute has announced the appointment of Professor Andrew Blake, currently Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, as its first Director. Professor Blake will join the Institute in October. Along with the announcement of its new Director the Institute has marked its first few days of operations with the confirmation of £10 million of research funding from Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a research partnership with GCHQ, a collaboration with Cray Inc. and EPSRC, and its first research activities.

The LMS Election Forum 2015 is available here. Members are encouraged to contribute. 

The Nominating Committee slates for the 2015 LMS Elections are available here

The results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) were announced today.

Professor Martin Hairer FRS, University of Warwick becomes the ninth UK based mathematician to win the prestigious Fields Medal over its 80 year history. The medal recipients were announced today in a ceremony at the four yearly International Congress for Mathematicians, which on this occasion is being held in Seoul, South Korea.

We are pleased to announce that the first paper has been published in the new journal Transactions of the London Mathematical Society. The paper, ‘A weak*-topological dichotomy with applications in operator theory’ by Tomasz Kania, Piotr Koszmider and Niels J. Laustsen, is freely available via http://tlms.oxfordjournals.org/content/current.

The President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Nils Chr. Stenseth has announced that Professor Yakov G. Sinai, Princeton University, USA, and Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences has been awarded the 2014 Abel Prize ‘for his fundamental contributions to dynamical systems, ergodic theory, and mathematical physics’. The Abel Prize has been awarded annually since 2003 and carries a cash award of NOK 6,000,000 (about EUR 750,000 or USD 1 million).

Dr David Platt, a researcher at the University of Bristol, won the Gold medal (sponsored by the Clay Mathematics Institute) at a competition in the House of Commons, for the excellence of his mathematics research, walking away with a £3,000 prize. This is the first time a mathematical sciences section has been included in SET for Britain.

Hundreds of early career researchers to descend on Parliament.

For the largest national event of its kind, 210 early career scientists, engineers and mathematicians will arrive in Parliament on Monday 17 March to compete for the coveted Westminster Medal while exhibiting their groundbreaking research to politicians during SET for Britain 2014.