Mathematical Biology
Probability and Statistics
Sheffield has a proud tradition of research and teaching in probability and statistics, dating back to the early 1950s under Geoffrey Jowett and Hilda Davies. In 1965 Professor Joe Gani was appointed as the first professor and head of the new Department of Probability and Statistics which separated from the Mathematics Departments. He established an MSc course and PhD programme which have now developed into three MSc courses and a large PhD group covering a wide range of areas including many joint projects with other university departments. The research group in probability and statistics has 13 academic staff (including 5 professors), 3 research associates, and 21 postgraduate students. The group has a seminar series with external invited speakers, and regular informal research meetings, led by members of the group.
Linked with the group are The Applied Probability Trust, which publishes two major international journals (Journal of Applied Probability and Advances in Applied Probability), and the Statistical Services Unit, which provides a comprehensive range of services to industry, commerce and the public services, including consultancy, courses and the development of computer software.
Research in probability includes: branching processes; random walk; large deviations; fractals and random graphs; Levy processes; probability on groups; stochastic analysis and inference for stochastic processes.
Research in statistics includes: experimental design; genetic epidemiology; medical statistics and surveillance methods; multivariate analysis; size distributions with industrial applications; theory and applications of Bayesian statistics, with particular interests in archaeology, ecology, health economics, time series analysis, prior elicitation, and analysing uncertainty in complex computer models.
School-wide groups
Analysis
The analysis group is a school-wide collection of mathematicians who share a common interest in the development and use of analytic techniques. We encompass real, complex, functional, harmonic, numerical and stochastic analysis; operator algebras and analytic K-theory; analysis on groups, graphs, manifolds and other structures; ordinary, partial and stochastic differential equations; chaos, fractals and dynamical systems; applications of analytic methods to concrete problems in e.g. number theory, topology, probability theory, fluids and physics.