Engineering Mathematics

Research groups

The Applied Nonlinear Mathematics Group is firmly rooted in a culture of solving real-world problems. Applications include traffic flow, optical devices, novel materials, aircraft dynamics, rotating machinery, epilepsy biomechanics and electrical networks. The group also undertakes fundamental research in areas such as local and global bifurcation theory, manifold computation, mathematical biology, non-smooth systems, delay differential equations, partial differential equations and control theory.

The University has a long tradition of excellence in artificial intelligence, with research groups in engineering dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. Now all these traditions have converged to form the Intelligent Systems Laboratory, a research unit with 16 members of staff (five professors) and about 40 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. Research activities include foundational work in machine learning (many of the unit's members work in this central area of research), and applications to web intelligence, machine translation, bioinformatics, semantic image analysis and robotics, uncertainty modelling and fuzzy systems, as well as natural intelligent systems.

In addition to these two main groups, there is new and emerging activity dedicated to robotics, including topics such as soft robotics, AI for robotics, tactile super-resolution and morphological computation.

A list of available projects can be found on the department website.

Careers

Students who graduate from the Department of Engineering Mathematics follow a wide range of careers, such as mathematical modelling and simulation in engineering consultancies, government scientific civil service, the Met Office and the intelligence services.

Many graduates go on to work in quantitative finance and financial services more broadly and several have recently become entrepreneurs in the data analytics industry. Others follow traditional academic career paths in university or in public and private sector research institutes.