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Stepping Into 2021

2/10/2021

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2021 has perhaps not had the start we would have hoped for.  It will be a while yet before we are back together again in the Alan Turing building.  Nevertheless, we are continuing meet online, and to balance research and online teaching with homeschooling and other family commitments, and we have had a busy few months since the last update in October.
Many congratulations to Marianthi Moschou who passed her PhD viva in December, and took up a post as teaching fellow in Mathematics!  Mary’s thesis is dedicated to diffraction theory, in particular to space varying impedance boundary conditions.

Online seminars
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​Several MWM group members have delivered online talks since the last update.  In November, Matt Nethercote contributed to the ICMS virtual seminar series on Waves in Complex Continua, with his talk, “Edge Diffraction of Acoustic Waves by Periodic Composite Metamaterials: The Hollow Wedge”.  You can find a recording of Matt’s seminar with all the other "Wavinars" here.  You will also find a talk given in the summer by PhD student Erik Garcia-Neefjes, "Thermo-Visco-Elastic effects in Wave Propagation".
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Anastasia Kisil spoke in the RCMM Wave Scattering and Solid Mechanics online seminar series in December. Her talk, entitled “Edges and Point Scatterers: a simple model for a metamaterial with edges” covered collaborative work with Raphael Assier and Matt Nethercote, and is available to view here.  Also in December, Will Parnell spoke about “Elastostatic cloaking, low frequency elastic wave transparency and neutral inclusions” at the ICMS Continuum Mechanics virtual seminar series in December, and online at the Laboratoire de Mécanique et d’Acoustique (Marseille) in October.  You can watch the ICMS talk here. 

In January, Raphael Assier gave a 3 lecture series to an American Mathematical Society (AMS) Mathematics Research Community (MRC) entitled “An applied perspective on multidimensional complex analysis”, hosted by Harvard University.

Click here to find a list of virtual seminar series.

Awards and publications

Papers from academic year 2019-2020 were discussed in October’s update, but some new publications have been released since then.  Most recently in January, several examples from Raphael Assier appeared, including "A Surprising Observation in the Quarter-Plane Diffraction Problem", with I. D. Abrahams in SIAM J. Appl. Math, and "Analytical continuation of two-dimensional wave fields" with Andrey Shanin in Proc. R. Soc. A.  An ongoing list can be found here.

Anastasia Kisil was part of a multi-institutional group that were successful in securing funding from European Commission H2020 MCSA-RISE for "EffectFact: Effective Factorisation techniques for matrix-functions".  This is a joint venture between several European Institutions in the area of factorisation techniques, Wiener-Hopf and Riemann-Hilbert problems and related numerical techniques, beginning in September 2021.  Anastasia, along with Anna Zemlyanova (Kansas State University), Gennady Mishuris (Aberystwyth University) and Xun Huang (Peking University) made a successful application to the BIRS Scientific Board to host a conference in the Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (IASM) in Hangzhou, China.  "Cross-Fertilisation of ideas from the Riemann–Hilbert Technique and the Wiener–Hopf Method" will be held in September 2022.
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William Parnell’s EPSRC award for “The Princess and the Pea: Mathematical Design of Neutral Inclusions and their Fabrication” began this month.  This project will explore neutral inclusions (NIs): material inclusions with coatings designed to ensure that stress fields in the host material are unperturbed upon loading, as if the inclusion were absent. NIs have the potential to reduce material failures due to stress concentration, and enable lighter, stronger materials.

Online Engagement. 
In-person events are likely to be further postponed for the several months, and we are continuing to find ways to engage online.  Our Virtual Postcards offer visual snapshots of our research themes, and our ongoing series, the A-Z of the Mathematics of Waves and Materials, takes an alphabetical journey through some of the key concepts behind our work.  This week we reached the letter I, with a piece on inclusions, written by Neil Morrison, so there are plenty more updates to come! 
PhD students Eleanor Russell and Tom White recently featured in the New Scientist Jobs "A Day in the Life" series, where they describe a typical day as a Mathematics PhD student, and discuss the best and worst parts of PhD life.  Students interested in a career in Applied Mathematics can explore our Meet a Mathematician series, or visit our YouTube channel.

March brings British Science week, and we are looking forward to engaging with local high school pupils with our virtual workshop “The Great Maths Hunt”, which will take a look at everyday life and challenge students to answer: “Where is the maths?”  Students will uncover the hidden mathematical research behind everyday things, and find out who mathematicians work with, how they solve problems, and where a career in maths may take them.
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From March, we look forward to working with the Metamaterials Network’s Outreach and Education forum, led by Anja Roeding (University of Exeter), and Raphael Assier.  The group will coordinate outreach activities in the field of metamaterials across several UK institutions.

​Finally, during this extended 
International Year of Sound, the journal Frontiers for Young minds is preparing a special collection entitled “A World of Sound”.  Frontiers for Young Minds is an open access scientific journal written for and reviewed by children.  Naomi Curati is one of the collection editors, along with other members of the UK Acoustics Network.  We look forward to reading the collection!

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    About us

    The Mathematics of Waves and Materials group are are a research group in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester.  We work on the theoretical, numerical and experimental aspects of both materials and waves. See our research page for more information and details.

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