Profile

I grew up in London, then went to school in Canterbury to be near my grandparents. When I was young I liked languages and creative writing at school, and my teacher said I didn’t know my times tables properly. I got into studying maths and science when I was a teenager, from reading science fiction novels and popular science: I was fascinated by the weirdness of black holes and quantum physics. Eventually I became a mathematical physicist: I did my BA degree at Oxford, then a PhD at Edinburgh, both in Mathematics, but in my doctorate I was lucky to be able to take graduate courses in Theoretical Physics at the same time, including my first course in quantum field theory taught by Professor Higgs (who later won the Nobel prize when his particle was discovered). After that I briefly studied at the Landau Institute in Russia, before going to Rome to do postdoctoral research. I got married in Italy, where our first child was born, and not long afterwards we moved to Adelaide (Australia), where I had another research post. Eventually we moved back to the UK, and after being unemployed for a few months and doing lots of job interviews, I got offered my first lecturing position in Canterbury. I have worked there ever since, apart from sabbaticals in Cambridge and Sydney, where I recently spent two years living with my family.

If you study physics, then you’ll know that you need to use maths to write down things like Newton’s laws of motion. I started out my career in mathematical physics, working on the equations that describe special types of water waves called “solitons”, which don’t spread out like ripples on a pond, but travel in lumps that keep their shape and speed when they move, a bit like small particles or packets of energy that appear in quantum physics. I’ve also worked on equations that describe immune cells in biology – how your body reacts if you get an infection. Nowadays my work goes in the opposite direction in some sense: rather than taking equations that apply to physics, I take ideas from physics (like conservation of energy) and use them to help get a handle on hard maths problems to do with numbers and algebra.

Throughout most of my career I was lecturing to students in the morning/afternoon, and usually doing the school run first thing, so when my kids were small I got up early to make them a big breakfast before they went out every day. Now they are all teenagers/young adults and look after themselves more: my elder daughter is about to start her 3rd year of university, and my son has just finished A-Levels and will start university this autumn, so only my younger daughter still needs a lift. In the past six years I have had a research grant that bought out my teaching time, so I have been working on my own maths projects more or less full time. This has also left me free to travel round the world working with other mathematicians. So I travelled to China a few times to give lectures, as well as Spain and Japan, and moved to Sydney with my family for nearly two years, to work with colleagues there and in Melbourne. This has allowed me to have a much more varied schedule. The recent lockdowns have meant changing to online seminars and chats with student, and also meant that I tend to get up later and work late in the evening instead of the morning. Also this has made me realize that I don’t need to travel so much, as I can get a lot of things done just as well by connecting via Zoom and email; but I do miss chatting to my friends face to face.