School of Mathematics

Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship awarded to Tom Leinster

Tom Leinster has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship entitled 'Magnitude and Diversity'. Different branches of mathematics study very different objects, but in many branches, there is a natural notion of size. The simplest is just "number of elements", but other familiar notions of size are volume, surface area and perimeter, and there are many more. It turns out that all these can be unified into a single concept: the "magnitude of an enriched category". Abstract as this is, it has proved to have important applications in the measurement of biological diversity. It also shines a light on classical concepts from geometry to analysis to algebra, which will be investigated in this project.