Congratulations to Professor Alain Goriely of the University of Oxford, who is awarded the 2025 LMS/IMA David Crighton Medal. The award is in recognition of his deep and influential mathematical insights into mechanical and biological processes and materials, for his support of early career mathematicians, and his contributions to the public understanding of mathematics and its applications.
Alain’s research has opened new ways of looking at phenomena. His early research in dynamical systems provided new criteria for the existence of chaotic solutions and developed techniques to describe integrability in complex time. In mechanics he introduced novel ideas for how to model filaments, leading to a general stability theory applicable in many areas. In particular he described a new instability he called ‘tendril perversion’ that explains the entanglement of vines and other biological structures. He also developed a classification of nonlinear solids that determines the types of defects that can occur. This interaction between materials and their dynamic properties underpins ideas of growth and form going back to D’Arcy Thompson over one hundred years ago. Alain was able to develop mathematical tools that describe growth-induced instabilities in elastic materials, leading to pattern formation in fungi and bacteria. Read the full citation here.
The David Crighton Medal is awarded jointly by the LMS and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. The award ceremony and Crighton Lecture will be held in spring 2026.