Department of Mathematics

"The London School of Economics has the highest proportion of "world-leading" research among UK universities..."

The results for REF 2014 have now been published. Click here to find out how the Department and the School overall performed.

Recent Publications

A list of recent research publications of the staff (and PhD students) of the Department can be found on our Publications page.

Research Seminars

The Department hosts regular well-attended research seminars during term-time covering topics in all our main research areas.

Current Students

You can find information about our course modules, including links to the course materials hosted on Moodle, and lecturers' and class teachers' office hours by clicking here.

Public Lecture: The Diffusion of Social and Technological Innovations

Date: Monday 7 March 2016
Time:  6.30-8pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor H. Peyton Young
Chair: Professor Martin Anthony

Professor Peyton Young is Centennial Professor of Mathematics at the London School of Economics. He is also a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

In this lecture, Peyon considers how new ideas, technologies, and ways of doing things are the key to economic growth and development. Yet it often takes many years after the introduction of an innovation before it comes into widespread use. Delays result from many issues; we examine these in the context of several well-documented cases.  The event will be chaired by Professor Martin Anthony (@MartinHGAnthony), Professor of Mathematics and Head of Department of Mathematics at LSE. A video of the lecture will be available shortly after the event.

Public Lecture: Non-Western Mathematics

Date: Monday 18 January 2016
Speaker: Professor Robin Wilson
Chair: Professor Jan van den Heuvel

Professor Robin Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics, LSE.  In this lecture, he explored the mathematics of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and the Mayans.  The event was chaired by Professor Jan van den Heuvel, Professor of Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, LSE.

The podcast and video of the lecture can be found here, with accompanying slides available here.

Using Mathematics: Making Big Economics Visible to the Human Eye

Date: Wednesday 9 December 2015
Speaker: Professor Danny Quah
Chair: Professor Jan van den Heuvel

World-renowned Professor Danny Quah (Professor of Economics and International Development, LSE) discussed large economic facts about the world which mathematics helps to uncover.  The event was hosted jointly by the LSESU Applicable Maths Society and the Department of Mathematics and was chaired by Professor Jan van den Heuvel (Mathematics, LSE).

The video of the lecture can be viewed here, with accompanying slides available here.

New blog post - A tribute to Anatole Beck (1930-2014)

A little over a year since his passing, Adam Ostaszewki, Professor of Mathematics at LSE, remembers Anatole Beck, our friend and colleague, with input from Steve Alpern and Kenneth Binmore.

New blog post - Ewan Davies – Counting the number of ways a gas can fill a room

Ewan Davies is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Mathematics. His research is on graph theory, the study of connected systems of abstract ‘things’ which we call graphs. In his latest blog post, he develops a new method for understanding mathematical models in these graphs, using particles of a gas or atoms in a molecule as examples.

New blog post - Norman Biggs – Strictly not dancing

With the season finale is set to air just before Christmas, Norman Biggs, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at LSE, has addressed some questions arising from the scoring system of the popular UK television programmeStrictly Come Dancing.  Taking the limited data the programme reveals, Norman shows that it is still possible to deduce public voting trends.

Giacomo Zambelli (LSE) awarded the 2015 Lanchester Prize by INFORMS

Giacomo Zambelli, Associate Professor in LSE’s Mathematics Department (with co-authors Gerard Cornuejols (Tepper School of Business) and Michele Conforti (University of Padova)) has been awarded the prestigious Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for 2015 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the largest professional body in the world in the field of operations research, management science, and analytics. The prize, which honours “the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English in the past three years”, was awarded for their book “Integer Programming”, published by Springer in December 2014.  Read more about Giacomo's award here.

Prizewinners aplenty!

Summer Term is a time for celebration and we're very pleased to announce the following winners in 2015:

• LSE Teaching Promotion Awards: Dr Amol Sasane was promoted to Professor in recognition of his exemplary contributions to teaching and to the Department.
• LSE Class Teacher Awards: Elisabeth Grieger, Matthew Jenssen, Philip Johnson, Tony Whelan and Georgios Zouros were nominated by our department in recognition of the special contribution made to teaching.
• Institute of Mathematics and its Applications Prize Shyamal Patel, BSc Mathematics and Economics, is this year’s Joint Winner of the IMA Prize for Outstanding Performance in the Final Year of an Institute of Mathematics and its Applications approved course.

• The Cyril Offord Prize 2015 for outstanding performance in Mathematics was awarded to Jeremy MacRae, BSc Mathematics and Economics.

Full details of all prizes can be found here.