Mason Porter, Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems and a Fellow of Somerville, has been awarded a 2015 Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society (LMS).
The award, which was announced at a council meeting of the LMS at British Medical Association House in London earlier this month, recognises Professor Porter’s pioneering and interdisciplinary work in network science.
“Obviously, I am very pleased to have won this award,” said Professor Porter. “It’s also particularly nice to see interdisciplinary contributions explicitly recognized in the award citation. My work is often ‘untraditional’ with respect to the norm in mathematics, and it’s really nice to see it recognised by my peers.”
The posting on the LMS website reads:
A Whitehead Prize is awarded to Professor Mason Porter of the University of Oxford in recognition of his outstanding interdisciplinary contributions and in particular to the emerging field of network science, where he has combined unique analysis of biological, social and political data sets with novel methods for community detection and other forms of coarse graining.
“We are so proud of Professor Porter’s achievement” said Dr Steve Rayner, Senior Tutor at Somerville. “In the 21st century, network Mathematics has applications in a huge number of contexts, both technological and purely human. We are delighted that the ground-breaking work of one of our Fellows has received this well-deserved recognition.”
“In addition to his world-leading research, Mason is also a very popular tutor in Mathematics amongst the students and is very actively engaged in outreach work designed to encourage talented young people, particularly women, to consider Mathematics as a degree, and possibly a career, choice” said Dr Rayner.
In the autumn, Professor Porter will be chairing Celebrating Women in Computer Science to mark 200 years since the birth of Ada Lovelace.