Professor Terry Lyons

Professor Terry Lyons

The presentation of Professor Terry Lyons as Honorary Fellow of the University by Professor Noel Lloyd on Friday 16 July 2010.

Barchus Lywydd, mae’n bleser i gyflwyno Yr Athro Terry Lyons yn Gymrawd o Brifysgol Aberystwyth. 

It is a great pleasure to introduce Professor Terry Lyons as a Fellow of Aberystwyth University.  Professor Lyons is an eminent mathematician.  He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge and completed his doctoral work at Oxford.  He became a Colin Maclaurin Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University and then moved to a chair at Imperial College London before moving to Oxford in 2000 as the Wallis Professor of Mathematics.  He is a Fellow of St Anne’s College.

Professor Lyons is one of the countries leading mathematical analysts and has received a whole range of prizes and honours reflecting his standing in the mathematics community.  He has published important work in stochastic analysis and has received numerous invitations to lecture in high profile conferences.  For example, he was an invited Lecturer of the fourth European Congress of Mathematics in 2004 and gave one of the Abel Lectures in 2007.   He was awarded the Pólya Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2000.  The LMS is essentially the British Mathematical Society, the Pólya Prize is awarded in recognition of outstanding creativity in, imaginative exposition of, or distinguished contribution to mathematics within the United Kingdom and is one of the society’s most prestigious awards.  Professor Lyons was elected to a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Toulouse three years ago. 

Professor Lyons’s mathematical interests are related to Stochastic Analysis, which is the study of mathematical tools that can be used to model and describe high dimensional systems in which there is random behaviour.  It is an area that brings together the approach of the pure mathematician for whom rigorous proof is at the core of his or her activities with a development of the key mathematical ideas that enables mathematics to grow and be communicated.  Professor Lyons gives an excellent explanation of mathematical proof as being synonomous with a precise, convincing and detailed explanation.  Virtually all areas of applied mathematics today involve some consideration of randomness especially in those cases when very large datasets are to be investigated.  Professor Lyons has done important work in financial mathematics and his work relates to such diverse areas as mobile phone networks and fixed rate mortgages.  The key to his work though is the identification of the fundamental underlying mathematics that is needed to model the interaction between oscillatory systems. 

A few years ago, the Wales Institute of Mathematical and Computational Sciences was established.  I was delighted when this happened having been involved at an early stage of the development of the concept as a mathematician and then as Vice-Chancellor in bringing people together.  It is important that Institutions work together; it is only so by doing that the required range of expertise is established to attack those problems that are of significance.  The Wales Institute encompasses the universities of Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, Swansea and more recently Glamorgan, but is not exclusive.  It is structured to bring mathematicians working in various areas together.  It is focused and was established for a very clear purpose.  It engages in outreach with schools and brings industrial mathematicians into contact with academic colleagues.  The constituent clusters are in Analysis, Stochastic Processes and Analysis, Mathematical Physics, Computational modelling, and Statistics and Operational Research. 

I was delighted when Professor Lyons was appointed to be its first Director.  He has been a tireless proponent of the concept of pan-Wales collaboration and of the linkages between researchers and the beneficiaries of research.  He also emphasises the importance of stimulating interest in mathematics in young people and establishing pathways for them to Higher Education.  I refer in particular to the Further Mathematics Programme, in which schools are supported to teach Further Mathematics at A-Level and the programme in which senior mathematicians within the universities participate in activities to stimulate interest in Mathematics amongst young people.  I am pleased that this is taken so seriously, and that Aberystwyth University is involved in it.  The Institute has been supported by the Welsh Assembly Government and by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and I look forward to Professor Lyons’s continuing contribution to mathematics and science more generally in Wales and to the sustainable development of the Wales Institute of Mathematical and Computational Sciences. 

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Terry Lyons as a Fellow of Aberystwyth University in recognition of his contributions to mathematical research, pedagogy, the applications of research and to the development of the Wales Institute of Mathematical and Computational Sciences. 

Barchus Lywydd, cyflwynaf yr Athro Terry Lyons yn Gymrawd o Brifysgol Aberystwyth.

AU13410

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