Ian David Abrahams (born 15 January 1958) is an English mathematician and held the

Beyer Professor of Applied Mathematics The Beyer Chair of Applied Mathematics is an endowed professorial position in the Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester, England. The endowment came from the will of the celebrated locomotive designer and founder of locomotive builde ...

at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

, 2008–2016. From 2014–16 he was Director of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh and in October 2016 he succeeded

John Toland John Toland (30 November 167011 March 1722) was an Irish rationalist philosopher and freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political philosophy and philosophy of religion, which are early expressions ...

as Director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and

N M Rothschild and Sons Rothschild & Co is a multinational investment bank and financial services company, and the flagship of the Rothschild banking group controlled by the French and British branches of the Rothschild family. The banking business of the firm covers t ...

Professor of Mathematics, in Cambridge. He was President 2007–2009, of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. In 2017 he was awarded the IMA/ LMS David Crighton Medal for services to mathematics.

Education

Born in

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of City of Salford, Salford to ...

, Abrahams was the son of Harry Abrahams and of Leila Abrahams. He completed his

BSc A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

aeronautical engineering Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is sim ...

in 1979 and PhD (and DIC) in

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathemat ...

in 1982, both at

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a ...

. There he won two scholarships and the Finsbury Medal for top undergraduate. For his PhD he was supervised by Frank Leppington for a thesis entitled ''The scattering of sound by finite thin elastic plates and cavities''. In the same year, he moved to Manchester on a 1-year contract. This was the beginning of a collaboration with

GR Wickham GR may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Film and television * '' Golmaal Returns'', a 2008 Bollywood film * '' Generator Rex'', an animated TV series * Guilty Remnant, a cult-like organization portrayed in '' The Leftovers'', an HBO telev ...

. First, they developed some general techniques for solving matrix Wiener–Hopf problems and this gave the solution to a basic problem of diffraction theory, namely, scattering by two parallel, semi-infinite, staggered plates. Motivated by the problems of

austenitic steel Austenitic stainless steel is one of the five classes of stainless steel by crystalline structure (along with ''ferritic'', ''martensitic, duplex and precipitation hardened''). Its primary crystalline structure is austenite (face-centered cubic) ...

welds, they went on to develop a theory for wave propagation in certain inhomogeneous anisotropic solids. They also gave asymptotic solutions for scattering by small defects in an elastic half-space making use of a certain expansion of the half-space

Green's function In mathematics, a Green's function is the impulse response of an inhomogeneous linear differential operator defined on a domain with specified initial conditions or boundary conditions. This means that if \operatorname is the linear differenti ...

. More recently Abrahams has found aspects of the Wiener-Hopf technique that impinge on finance and

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...

. This has led to developments, for example in relating Wiener-Hopf factorisation to Spitzer's identity and other important results within probability theory.

Personal life

In 2004, Abrahams married Penelope Lawrence Warwick with whom he has one daughter and two step sons. Abrahams's leisure interests include motorcycling and he owns a 1977

Triumph Bonneville The Triumph Bonneville is a standard motorcycle featuring a parallel-twin four-stroke engine and manufactured in three generations over three separate production runs. The first two generations, by the defunct Triumph Engineering in Meriden, W ...

T140V, as well as a 1000cc

Moto Guzzi Moto Guzzi is an Italian motorcycle manufacturer and the oldest European manufacturer in continuous motorcycle production. Established in 1921 in Mandello del Lario, Italy, the company is noted for its historic role in Italy's motorcycling m ...

References

External links

Archived home page at University of Manchester
Living people Alumni of Imperial College London Academics of the University of Manchester 20th-century English mathematicians 21st-century English mathematicians David Crighton medalists 1958 births Place of birth missing (living people) {{UK-mathematician-stub