Global maths challenges

Calculating probabilities is something that many mathematicians do routinely, but Oxford researchers were crossing their fingers in February as they put together a final proposal that could net them $25 million of research funding. The mathematicians were proposing a new centre for applied and computational maths that they believed could both promote interdisciplinary maths around the world and offer an unprecedented opportunity to address quantitative challenges in the physical and biological sciences and industry. On 1 April they learned that their bid had been successful: the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics (OCCAM) was born. 

OCCAM is supported through the Global Research Partnership (GRP), the extramural research programme of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). This new graduate-level university with a multi-billion dollar endowment is being built in Saudi Arabia, about 50 miles north of Jeddah. Its academic structure will be organised around four interdisciplinary research themes – resources, energy and environment; biosciences and bioengineering; materials science and engineering; and applied mathematics and computational science. The anticipated 240 faculty members, 390 researchers and 2,000 students will work with KAUST’s partners around the world.

To help establish its international research expertise, KAUST invited around 60 leading universities to put forward proposals for multi-investigator partner centres that would address important interdisciplinary problems, particularly those of significance within the Gulf region and which sit within their research themes. The OCCAM proposal was one of four centres – and the only one outside the USA – to receive funding in the first round of GRP awards.

‘For any university to allocate a quarter of its budget to applied maths and computational science is unprecedented’, says Professor John Ockendon, Director of OCCAM. ‘Maths will be both physically – on the KAUST campus – and intellectually at the heart of the whole enterprise. That is astonishingly bold and farsighted.’

Oxford has a long ethos of applying maths and computational skills to solve problems in science and industry, and OCCAM will build on the skills in four pre-existing groups: the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Centre for Mathematical Biology, the Numerical Analysis Group and the Computational Biology Group. In addition, the University’s burgeoning international network of mathematicians will help establish OCCAM as the hub of a global operation that collaborates to enhance the status of problem-solving mathematics and to harness and train young talent to meet the challenges.

OCCAM’s grant of $25 million over five years will enable it to recruit and support new staff, launch new research projects and expand Oxford’s much-admired international programme of Mathematical Study Groups with industry. These one-week workshops, the first of which was held in the Mathematical Institute in 1968, bring together mathematicians and industrial researchers with open problems. The problems, which may vary from modelling subsidence during tunnelling to designing strategies to minimise homelessness, are described at the beginning of the week; the mathematicians then examine possible solutions in a series of brainstorming sessions, all the while keeping in close touch with the industrialists. Innovative mathematical thinking is stimulated and real problems often solved or put in a new light. Study Groups take place around the world, in basic science as well as in industry, and OCCAM is sponsoring new venues this year, including Canada, Northern India and California.

‘We have unrivalled expertise in running these groups and are much in demand’, says Professor Ockendon. ‘Until OCCAM, we simply didn’t have the resources to offer. Now we have the money to mobilise our global network to help with Study Groups all over the world. We also have the resources to follow up research projects coming out of the Study Groups.’

OCCAM has funding to appoint research fellows on five-year contracts, and to support postdocs and graduate students with a flexibility and speed that traditional agencies cannot match. Current projects for such members include topics of clear interest in Saudi Arabia: flow in porous media and the implications for oil recovery; simulating oil reservoirs and using stochastic (statistical) techniques to study oil field histories and predict future supply; looking at plant and crop growth in a hostile environment; modelling the evolution of desert and coastal topographies. Other projects address ‘dry eye’, a painful medical condition exacerbated in hot climates, ultrafiltration techniques for biowaste processing and new fast algorithms for multiscale physical processes.

‘The maths we do is very interdisciplinary and collaborative – it may involve chemistry, biology, physics, materials or engineering, or any combination of those – and this interaction is a key element in what we do’, says Dr Chris Breward, OCCAM’s Deputy Director. ‘Not only do we try to apply existing mathematical methods to brand new problems but we are always on the look out for new mathematics, be it analytical or numerical, that may be sparked off by the new application. And although we mostly work with desktop machines, KAUST will have a petaflop computer – one of the most powerful in the world – that we can have access to.’

OCCAM staff are equipped with desktop videoconferencing and other interactive technologies to facilitate worldwide communication. Faculty members will also be delivering graduate-level courses directly to KAUST over the internet.

‘Our research philosophy is in the spirit of Occam’s razor,’ says Professor Ockendon. ‘We aim to extract the essence of a scientific problem and then use mathematical and computational analysis to extend our intuition and gain deeper insight.’ He adds: ‘I very much hope that OCCAM will enthuse researchers in countries where there is no tradition of interdisciplinary maths to pursue challenges that are both intellectually exciting and practically relevant.’