Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Mathematical Institute
University of Oxford
Big News: As of 30 June 2016, I am a
Professor in the Department of
Mathematics at UCLA. I will physically move there in the last
third of September. (The plan is to retain a Visiting Professor
position at University of Oxford for the forseeable future. Starting
in summer 2017, I will be visiting here for about one month each
summer.) Further updates to my web page will occur at UCLA.
I was born and raised in the United States. I was technically
born in Los Angeles (in California), but I actually lived in Beverly
Hills until I went to college.
In order, the schools I attended are Temple Emanuel Nursery
School (because, of course, you really needed to know that), Hawthorne
Elementary School, Beverly Hills High School (yes, I really did go
there), California Institute of Technology (BS, Applied Math, 1998;
member of Lloyd House), and Cornell University (PhD, Center for
Applied Mathematics, 2002).
From Fall 2002 through Spring 2005, I did a postdoc in
Mathematics and the Center for Nonlinear Science (housed in the School
of Physics) at Georgia Tech. (In Spring 2003, I was on leave from
that position to be a postdoc in the Semiclassical Analysis program at
the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley,
California.)
From June 2005 until 30 September 2007, I was a postdoc at
Caltech in the Center for the Physics of Information. I was also part
of the condensed matter physics group.
Since 1 October 2007, I have been on the faculty of the
Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford. (Can you tell that I
take vacations? Quickly check the dates you just read.)
This is completely irrelevant for my research group page, but I
am a diehard fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers (a baseball team).
I'm not going to write a web page this extensive without putting that
information somewhere prominent.
Got all that?
Research Interests
I am interested in numerous areas of applied mathematics, and I am
always looking for new areas to try. (I basically keep adding new
research interests.) However, here are a few buzzwords describing
areas in which I have already written research papers or have projects
in progress:
E-mail: porterm [at] maths [dot] ox [dot] ac [dot] uk
Office: Andrew Wiles Building ("Mathematical Institute"),
second floor, room S2.04
Phone: +44 (0)1865 280608
Fax: +44 (0)1865 273583
IM: tepid451
Send snail mail to the following address: Mason Porter,
Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG, UK
How I got interested in my research area in the first place
People run into mathematicians (not usually literally, but I have a
few stories...) and sometimes wonder how they got that way. Both
normal people and junior scientists (I'm thinking in particular of
undergrads and grad students who are still trying to figure out what
they want to do) also wonder how scientists got interested in their
particular research areas. I think it's extremely useful to provide
an answer to this question, so here's my story:
My initial interest in nonlinear dynamical systems arose from a
childhood fascination with patterns. The sketches that I began
drawing when I was very young included many such displays of
contrasting color. (I glanced through these sketches a few years ago,
and several of them look remarkably similar to patterns that occur in
nonlinear science. This is a statement either of how little I've
progressed since then or of how I was born to study nonlinear science.
I'm not really sure which...)
In high school, I noticed that fractals could produce colorful
patterns in the same vein as what I liked to draw, which led to my
interest in them. In college, I discovered that what really
intrigued me was trying to understand the mechanisms that could
produce such interesting pictures and the real-life and man-made
systems that exhibited them. Since then, my interests have branched
out into several fields of science that can be studied using
dynamical systems and other methods.
In short, while my research interests have diversified in the last
several years, my academic interests initially arose largely from what
I consider visually appealing.