PhD applicants

We are always happy to talk to interested PhD applicants. Have a look at our members section to see if you like the look of what we do.

Prospective postgraduates should note that a strong student with a good all-round knowledge of undergraduate pure mathematics would still need to do large amounts of preparatory reading to begin with. Their work is likely to have as much to do with algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, analytic functions and representation theory as with undergraduate courses on elementary number theory.

Who to talk to

Any of the lecturers would be delighted to discuss potential PhD projects they have. Please send any of them an email.

If you would like a more first-hand idea of what PhD life is like here at the Number Theory Group you are more than welcome to email the current PhD students.

Funding

You can read about the details of funding on The University of Sheffield website.

PhD life in the Number Theory Group

We have many PhD students working on a variety of areas in the Number Theory Group. In the department there are many other PhD students to talk to working in Algebraic Topology, Algebraic Geometry, Category Theory and Differential Geometry.

The University of Sheffield department is quite an active one. Each week there is the opportunity to attend a wide variety of seminars run by the various research groups.

We run a learning seminar every semester. Past topics included Galois representations, Group Cohomology and the Eichler-Shimura Isomorphism, Shimura Curves, Automorphic Forms and Representation Theory, Conjectures of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer and of Bloch and Kato. Our activities page has more details.

More broadly there are several postgraduate reading groups in areas other than number theory. To name a few, there have been study groups on Topological K-Theory, V I Arnold’s book Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics, Applied Topology and Noncommutative Geometry.