The LMS UK-Lebanon Atiyah Fellowship scheme was set up in memory of Sir Michael Atiyah OM (1929-2019). The LMS is delighted to announce that the first two fellowships, for the academic year 2020-21, have been awarded to Professor Mark Wildon, Royal Holloway, University of London and Professor Ahmad Sabra, American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon.
Professor Wildon's main research area is the representation theory of the symmetric and general linear groups. He will be visiting the Centre for Advanced Mathematical Sciences at AUB for four months in 2021. He plans to work on the geometric structure of a family of representations of the general linear group GL(2,C) and on the analogous representations defined over number fields and fields of prime characteristic. The characters of these modules are obtained using the plethysm product on symmetric functions: this brings in a rich circle of ideas from algebraic combinatorics and connects two exciting areas of mathematics. Professor Wildon also hopes to visit Beirut Arab University during his stay in Lebanon and to attend and give seminars at both universities.
Professor Sabra is interested in inverse problems involving surfaces which achieve prescribed optical tasks. He has studied the existence and uniqueness of such surfaces as well as their regularity properties and the stability of such optical systems. Sabra was awarded his PhD from Temple University in 2015 and following a postdoc in Warsaw has been an Assistant Professor at AUB since 2017. He will be visiting Dr Omar Lakkis at the University of Sussex for two months in 2020-21. The aim of their project is to apply Galerkin methods to construct numerical approximations of solutions to the Monge-Ampère type equation that appears in far field refractor problems. During his stay he also plans to visit other researchers in Bath, Edinburgh, Oxford and elsewhere.
Applications for Fellowships to be held in 2021-22 will open in early September. More information is available here.