NIALL MACKAY'S HOMEPAGE

Niall MacKay

Me, Piccolino and the Needles.

Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics, University of York
Phone: +44 1904 433493
Office: G/111

I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, a graduate student at Durham and a post-doc in Kyoto before returning to Cambridge (at Queens' and Pembroke Colleges). In 1998 I moved to Sheffield as a lecturer, and on to York in 2000.

Research

Mathematical physics, and in particular integrable models. You can find most of my publications here. If you're interested in doing a PhD or other research project with me, here are some ideas. My current research students are Barry Miller and Adele Taylor; past students were Georg Gandenberger, Ben Short and Ukyo Kono, and post-docs Nikolai Kitanine and Charles Young. Undergraduate project students in mathematical physics have included Gina Titchener, Kevin Baron, Patrick Massot and Rob Edwards.

Here are introductions to string theory by Mike Green and John Pierre and Peter Woit's original rant against it. Take your pick. Better still, synthesize, but delete Lubos Motl's expletives first. (My personal view: to paraphrase Talleyrand, string theory is never as strong as it looks, string theory is never as weak as it looks. Of course string theory, defined as the theory of extended objects [necessarily] moving in higher-dimensional spacetimes, is certain to be mathematically rich. Does physics need it? Well, it seems to imply, and relate in unexpected ways, an improbably large range of conventional physics if it doesn't.) This is an excellent article about the cultural differences between pure mathematics and theoretical physics.

I help organize the North British Mathematical Physics Seminar, an LMS-funded collaboration between Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, Durham and York theoretical physicists, and the annual UK meetings on 'Integrable Models, Conformal Field Theory and Related Topics'. I am a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.

I am one of the organizers of the Strong Fields, Integrability and Strings programme at the Isaac Newton Institute at Cambridge in the second half of 2007. This does not, however, make me a string theorist!

Teaching

Lecture course material and final-year projects are all now on the department's Moodle VLE.

Administration

undergraduate Admissions Tutor
member of the executive committee for combined Mathematics/Physics degree courses
I was an elected member of the National Council of the ILTHE from 2001-04, and am now an elected member of the Council of the Higher Education Academy, elected on the basis of this statement.
member of the Education Committee and of the board of Editorial Advisers of the London Mathematical Society
departmental representative for the HEA Maths Centre and the Newton Institute

Personal

Some random reading:

The Institute of Druidic Technology

The House of Lords Select Committee on Science's report on complementary and alternative medicine,
and a brief comment on it. This is what Joseph Conrad thought of the supernatural (give or take a comma).
Here's Immanuel Kant's definition of Enlightenment.

Spiked

John Baez
Maxwell on Middlemarch as Solar Myth

Some humanist quotations.

Work and play in Arthur Ransome
The Archbishop of Glasgow's Monition of Cursing against the Border Reivers
Kelvin is Lord!
The Skeptic
Dihydrogen monoxide - ban this dangerous chemical!
Martian
What's in the Tate Modern?
The Sokal hoax: start with his paper 'Transgressing the boundaries....'
The University of Bums on Seats.
The medium is the message: generate a postmodern essay.

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