The Queen's College Record 2023

Christopher Hollings (History of Mathematics)
My research this year has continued along two largely
separate paths: investigating the place of mathematics
within university education in nineteenth-century
Britain (at Oxford in particular), and ongoing work on
the historiography of ancient Egyptian mathematics, in
collaboration with Professor Richard Bruce Parkinson. Two
papers connected with the latter project have appeared in
print this year.
Reports and College Activities
With great relief, I have sent off to the publisher the texts of two long-running coeditorial
projects: Beyond the Learned Academy: The Practice of Mathematics
1600–1850, co-edited with Philip Beeley (Linacre/History Faculty), and Oxford’s
Sedleian Professors of Natural Philosophy: The First 400 Years, with Mark McCartney
(University of Ulster). Both books should come out with OUP by the end of 2023.
As usual, I co-organised ‘Research in Progress’, the annual postgraduate meeting
of the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM), which took place at
Queen’s in February 2023. I delivered an invited lecture at the BSHM’s Christmas
meeting in December 2022, and also in that month attended and spoke at a
workshop on the history of mathematics held in Germany at the Mathematisches
Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach.
In outreach work, I contributed to a discussion of the ninth-century Persian polymath
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi on ABC Radio Adelaide.
Jon Keating (Mathematics)
In my research, I have continued to focus on developing
the theory of random matrices, and on its applications to
machine learning and number theory. I published several
papers in this area over the past year.
My teaching was focused on delivering a course in the
Mathematical Institute on Random Matrix Theory, and on
supervising DPhil students.
I started my term as Treasurer and Vice-President of the Royal Society.
College Record 2023 | The Queen’s College 15