Carnegie PhD Scholar awarded Robertson Medal, 2018-19

On Tuesday 8th January 2019, Ross Paterson, PhD Scholar in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow received the Robertson Medal in Science, Engineering & Technologies for academic year 2018-19

The silver medal is awarded each year to the Scholarship candidate judged to be the most outstanding for that year’ competition. The medal was introduced in 2003 to mark the contribution of the retiring Chairman of the Trust, Sir Lewis Robertson, who served the Trust for over 40 years.

About this year’s recipient
Ross is originally from Stenhousemuir, Falkirk and studied Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. During his undergraduate degree he was awarded the Arthur Erdélyi prize for distinguished performance in his third year examinations. In Edinburgh, Ross wrote his dissertation on Lehmers problem, an open problem in number theory which asks how ‘small’ the roots of polynomials with integer coefficients can be.

Following this, he undertook Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge; here he was awarded the E.M. Burnett prize by his college, Hughes Hall, for performance in the final examinations. His Part III essay was titled `Counting Cubic Fields’, and was an exposition of a classical theorem of Davenport and Heilbronn on the number of cubic number fields of bounded discriminant, following the modern argument of Bhargava, Shankar and Tsimerman.

Ross is now undertaking a PhD in Number Theory, looking at Arithmetic Statistics for elliptic curves at the University of Glasgow with Dr. Alex Bartel and looks forward to the fascinating work in the coming years.