It has been an exceptional month for mathematics at Magdalen, with Fellows receiving a series of prestigious awards and honours in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the field.
At the heart of this success is Professor Martin Bridson FRS, Magdalen Fellow, Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics, and President of the Clay Mathematics Institute, who has been nominated as President-Elect of the London Mathematical Society (LMS), the UK’s learned society for mathematics.
Professor Bridson has also been awarded the LMS Pólya Prize in recognition of his foundational contributions to geometric group theory and his exceptional service to the mathematical community.
He has also received a Frontiers of Science Award in the category of Algebraic and Geometric Topology for the paper Absolute Profinite Rigidity and Hyperbolic Geometry. Published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2020, the paper was co-authored with Ben McReynolds, Alan Reid, and Ryan Spitler.
Professor Bridson’s research lies at the intersection of geometry, topology, and group theory, where ideas of symmetry, complexity, and curvature come together to address some of the deepest questions in modern mathematics.
Further success came with a second Frontiers of Science Award for Magdalen’s Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics, Ben Green, together with former Visiting Fellow Kevin Ford and former Fellow by Examination James Maynard. Their award recognises the paper Long Gaps Between Primes, co-authored with Sergei Konyagin and Terry Tao and published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.
The Frontiers of Science Awards will be presented at the International Congress of Basic Sciences in Beijing on 9 August 2026.