Information for Students

Office Hours

Due to various administrative obligations, I cannot guarantee to be available at any particular time, although I might well be! Please arrange a meeting well beforehand.

Take a look at my timetable first.

MATH6002 - Deterministic OR Methods (Mathematical Programming)

All material can be found on Blackboard.

MATH6003 - Presenting Reports

All material can be found on Blackboard.

MATH6120 - Nonlinear Programming

All material can be found on Blackboard.

MATH3032 - Communicating and Researching Mathematics

All material can be found on Blackboard.

Postgraduate Supervision

I am happy to supervise students on topics in Optimisation, Operational Research, Management Mathematics, and applications of Mathematics in the Real World. If you have a topic of particular interest to you that you want to write a thesis (PhD, MPhil, MSc, MSci) about and that fits into this, feel free to discuss your opportunities with me. On the other hand, you might want to take a look at my publications to see what I care most for. Topics which you might find interesting include

Multiobjective Optimisation, especially with applications in finance and engineering. This is, at the present moment, a very hot research topic, with excellent job opportunities. Numerical comparisons of different solution methods when applied to real-world problems as well as visualisation techniques for high-dimensional multiobjective problems are, in my opinion, particular rewarding topics for a thesis.
Real-Time Optimisation, especially routing and scheduling in telecommunication networks. I often have some research project with industrial partner (i. e. Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs, Qualcomm, etc.) going on, so you are not staying in the ivory tower when you do this. If you are interested in working on real-life problems, you will certainly find this exciting!
Optimization of satellite trajectories in space, i. e. Space Trajectory Analysis. This usually means for you that you will spend some time at the European Space Agency, more precisely at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC). Note that you need to have good programming skills if you want to work on this topic.

Letters of Reference

In order to facilitate a quick writing and editing process that leads to satisfying results, I have adopted the following scheme for writing letters of reference:

Letters of reference are only available for my personal tutees. If you are not one of these, please ask your own tutor.
You write your own letter of reference.
You email me a version of your letter in ASCII text format. Documents in other formats (e.g., Word) will not be accepted.
In case your letter cites progress reports or other specific achievements of yours, you provide me, as a proof of these, with an up-to-date CV, copies of the corresponding progress reports, or other supporting information. I prefer electronic versions (e.g., pdf-files), but you can hand in paper copies during my office hours (see above).
I edit the letter you sent me.
In case I feel that significant changes have been introduced, I will sent you an updated version of the letter. In case my changes are insignificant, I will not sent you an updated version. In the latter case we proceed immediately to step 8.
I expect some comments from you on any significant changes that I introduced.
Upon receiving your comments, I might edit the letter one more time --or not. Depends on you.
I print the letter, sign it, and place it in a sealed envelope.
You pick up the envelope in my office during my office hours (see above).

Back to my homepage.

Last change: 26 September 2009.