University of Warwick Mathematics Department

16/06/2026

Have you ever thought about the mathematics behind a great free kick?

With England’s campaign kicking off tomorrow night, we’ve been getting nostalgic for some of the special set pieces from previous tournaments - Beckham, Trippier, Rashford. Great goals, iconic moments.

But what can maths tell us about a great free kick? We caught up with Dr Lukas Eigentler, Assistant Professor and football fan, to find out more!

Script & animation: Lukas Eigentler
Filming & editing: Dave Musson
Beckham image: ger1axg via Wikimedia Commons
Trippier image: Антон Зайцев via Wikimedia Commons
Rashford image: Tasnim News Agency via Roberto Carlo images: Web Summit via Wikimedia Commons
Free kick cartoon: AlexLeal2069 via Wikimedia Commons
Soccer field icon: Muhammad Atif via Flaticon
Whistle sound: designerschoice via Freesound

28/05/2026

Massive congratulations to Professor Dwight Barkley, who has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society - one of the highest accolades in mathematics.

Professor Barkley is one of over 90 outstanding researchers from across the world have this year been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences. Fellowship of the Royal Society has been described by The Guardian as "the equivalent of a lifetime achievement Oscar."

Dwight Barkley is an applied mathematician whose research lies in nonlinear dynamics, pattern formation, and scientific computation. His work spans fluid, chemical, and biological systems, with a particular focus on the emergence of complex spatiotemporal behaviour in nonlinear partial differential equations.

He has made influential contributions to the study of instabilities, bifurcations, symmetry breaking, and wave phenomena in nonlinear systems, often through the development of original computational approaches that yield fundamental mathematical and physical insight. He has played a leading role in shaping the modern understanding of transition to turbulence in shear flows. He is widely known for two distinct models that bear his name—the Barkley model of excitable media and the Barkley model for pipe flow.

He was awarded the SIAM J. D. Crawford Prize for his contributions to nonlinear science. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the European Mechanics Society, and the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications.

Becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society sees him join the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Dorothy Hodgkin.

27/04/2026

❤❤❤

20/04/2026

Huge congratulations to Professor Nikos Zygouras, who has been awarded one of this year's Frontiers of Science Awards.

Professor Zygouras won the award for the paper The Critical 2D Stochastic Heat Flow, which he co-authored with Francesco Caravenna and Rongfeng Sun and that was published in Inventiones in 2023.

09/03/2026

Huge congratulations to Professor Richard Montgomery, who is one of the joint-winners of this year's Adams Prize!

The Adams Prize is one of the University of Cambridge's oldest and most prestigious prizes, and is awarded to UK-based researchers, under the age of 40, doing first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences.

This year's topic was 'discrete mathematics' and Professor Montgomery was jointly awarded the prize alongside Julian Sahasrabudhe (Cambridge).

According to the Adams Prize website, Professor Montgomery was recognised for his profound contributions to extremal combinatorics. His many important contributions include his proof of the celebrated Ryser-Brualdi-Stein conjecture on Latin squares, his result on transversal decompositions of random Latin squares, his proof of Ringel's conjecture on tree packing and his work resolving several old problems of Erdős and his collaborators on cycles in graphs.

Huge congratulations again to Professor Montgomery!

19/02/2026

Enjoying the curling at the Winter Olympics? Did you know that the Secretary General of the World Curling Federation is a Warwick Maths alumnus? In this video, Colin Grahamslaw (BSc Mathematics, 1991) reflects on his time at Warwick, his journey into the world of sport, and how he's helped keep the drawbridge open to future students by being a donor for more than 25 years.

Find out more about the Warwick alumni community by visiting www.warwick.ac.uk/alumni

09/02/2026

05/02/2026

Congratulations to Dr. Bryn Davies, who has been awarded £1 million by the Leverhulme Trust to develop new mathematical tools to help account for manufacturing imperfections when designing complex materials.

Dr Davies said: “Receiving this award is very exciting. It's a privilege to be trusted with such a large pot of funding at this stage in my career. The recognition means a great deal, and the funding will allow me to recruit a team of researchers to tackle these important scientific challenges.”

The Research Leadership Award from the Leverhulme Trust is presented to ‘talented scholars who are embarking on a university career who need to build a research team of sufficient scale to tackle a distinctive research problem.’ Universities are restricted to one applicant, and the award is only available once every three years.

Professor James Robinson, Head of Warwick Mathematics Institute, said: “Bryn's research demonstrates precisely the kind of originality and ambition that characterises applied mathematics at Warwick, and I am delighted that this has been highlighted by the award of this prestigious Leverhulme Research Leadership Award. It will serve to expand our fundamental understanding of complex materials and their potential applications.”

22/01/2026

Congratulations to our newest graduates! It was wonderful getting to celebrate with you yesterday’s degree ceremony - good luck for the next step in your adventure!

15/01/2026