Congratulations to Scott Harper and Tim Burness on their paper (written with Robert Guralnick) entitled ‘The spread of a finite group‘, to appear in Annals of Mathematics. Scott is a current Heilbronn Research Fellow and Tim is the Associate Chair of HIMR.

Much of Scott’s recent research has focussed on group generation, probabilistic group theory and permutation group theory. Two key themes of this work are the subgroup structure and conjugacy classes of simple groups (finite or algebraic), which are topics that have many applications across mathematics. Tim is interested in simple groups, both finite and algebraic, with a particular focus on subgroup structure, conjugacy classes and representation theory.