Liquid Crystals, Elastomers and Biological Applications Special Interest Group

It has been a successful year for the ECMI Special Interest Group on Liquid Crystals, headed by the University of Bath’s Apala Majumdar (Bath ECMI Representative) and the University of Strathclyde’s Nigel Mottram. Majumdar was awarded the London Mathematical Society Anne Bennett Prize in 2015 for “her outstanding contributions to the mathematics of liquid crystals and to the liquid crystal community.”

The international SIG network has grown considerably with Majumdar having co-organised three large international workshops on materials science: (i) the Indo-UK workshop on “Mathematics, mechanics, physics for tomorrow’s materials” at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Edinburgh in October 2015, (ii) a workshop on “Partial Order: Mathematics, Simulations and Applications” at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics in Los Angeles, USA in January 2016, and (iii) a 8-day workshop on “Partial Order in Materials: Analysis, Simulations and Beyond” at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM), Université de Montréal in June 2016. Mottram was a member of the scientific committee for the ICMS workshop.

Photo from the IPAM workshop on “Partial Order : Mathematics, Simulations and Applications”, 25th-29th January 2016, Los Angeles, USA (Courtesy of IPAM administration).

Further, Majumdar co-organised a batch of three minisymposia on “Non-Equilibrium Phenomena for Liquid Crystals: Mathematical Case Studies”, at the SIAM Conference on Materials Science in Philadelphia in May 2016, with colleagues from China and North America. In December 2016, Majumdar will organize a London Mathematical Society workshop on “Partially Ordered Materials –  Mathematical Perspectives and Challenges” at the University of Bath with invited speakers from Chile and China and a large cohort of promising researchers in the field from the United Kingdom.

There is now a large network of researchers in the mathematics and modelling of partially ordered materials, motivated by emerging applications, spanning Europe, North America, India and China and the SIG leaders hope to advance the network further by organising a SIG research workshop on “New materials for New Applications” at the University of Bath in 2017.

Please get in touch with Apala if you would like more information about upcoming events, or the activities of the SIG.