The University of Bristol’s School of Mathematics has been awarded three major grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to explore some of mathematics’ most intriguing problems.

A £2.26 million grant will fund a six-year joint study between Bristol and the University of Warwick to explore systematically the landscape L-functions.

L-functions allow mathematicians to count important quantities, such as primes or solutions of certain equations, and applications for their use extend from pure mathematics to cryptography as well as for physics in, for example, string theory.

This project will be led by Professors Brian Conrey (Bristol), John Cremona (Warwick), Jon Keating (Bristol) and Samir Siksek (Warwick) and Dr Andrew Booker (Bristol). One of its outputs will be an interactive database of L-functions that will be made freely available.

Bristol will also receive part of £3 million grant to support a five-year collaboration between Bristol and the University of Cambridge to apply Dynamical Systems ideas to stratified shear flows. The grant will allow researchers to make sense of this spatiotemporal phenomena by building on the techniques and ideas recently developed in small system flows.

This project will be led by Professor Paul Linden (Cambridge), Drs Stuart Dalziel, Colm Caulfied and John Taylor (all Cambridge) and Professor Rich Kerswell (Bristol).

Another £2.4 million grant from the EPSRC will also fund the i-like project, a large and broad statistical research project tackling challenging research problems in statistical inference for modern applications. This collaboration between Bristol and the Universities of Oxford, Lancaster and Warwick will be led by Professors Gareth Roberts (Warwick), Christophe Andrieu (Bristol), Paul Fearnhead (Lancaster), David Firth (Warwick) and Chris Holmes (Oxford).