The College Record 2022

This intensive research period has led to publications of the highest quality in my field
receiving international attention. This has been recognized by the plenary speaker
invitation to the International Conference on Industrial and Applied Mathematics
(ICIAM-2023) to be held in Tokyo, the most important international event in applied
mathematics, organized every four years. I have been elected vice president of the
ESMTB (European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology) and foreign
member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain 2021. I have continued as the
Head of the Division of the European Academy of Sciences, Section Mathematics.
I have also done service to the society by participating as the only mathematician
at the scientific committee of the Spanish Research Agency, the selection of ICREA
Research Professors in Catalunya and the Discovery Institute Support Grants 2022
of the NSERC in Canada.
Reports and College Activities
My dedication to high level teaching has been equally delivered developing a very
much needed course in Optimal Transportation at the Mathematical Institute. This is
a popular topic in modern mathematical research with ramifications in mathematical
analysis, probability theory, computational mathematics, and many applications in
stochastic analysis, data science, and optimization. The fantastic group of PDRAs of
my ERC project: Rafael Bailo, David Gomez-Castro, Pierre Roux, and Ruiwen Shu;
delivered a superb range of applied mathematics tutorials in the College and other
colleges and supervised several student summer projects, and master thesis at the
Mathematical Institute.
Credit: John Cairns
Christopher Hollings (History of Mathematics)
I have been on sabbatical this year, and so I have been able
to work on a range of research topics. First and foremost
among them has been my ongoing work with Richard
Bruce Parkinson on the historiography of ancient Egyptian
mathematics – on the contrasting attitudes of Egyptologists
and mathematicians towards the reconstruction of the
subject, and the uses to which they each put it. One paper
(about the Egyptologist and one-time Fellow of Queen’s, T. E. Peet) is to appear
in a volume published by the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of
Mathematics, and the writing of further papers is underway.
Work on a long-term editorial project – a volume entitled Beyond the Learned
Academy: The Practice of Mathematics 1600–1850, co-edited with Philip Beeley
(Linacre/History Faculty) – has continued and is nearing completion. In addition,
I have begun work on another edited volume, in collaboration with Mark McCartney
(University of Ulster), about Oxford’s Sedleian Professors of Natural Philosophy (who
nowadays are always Fellows of Queen’s). My own contributions to the book as
College Record 2022 | The Queen’s College 15