Congratulations to Scott Harper
01 Jun 2022, by News inCongratulations to Scott Harper, Heilbronn Fellow, who has been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (held in St Andrews) for his project “Group Generation: From Finite to Infinite”. The Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship is a highly prestigious, fiercely competitive award. It provides career development opportunities for researchers who are at a relatively early stage of their academic careers but who have a proven record of research.
Scott joined the Heilbronn Institute in 2019 following his PhD from the University of Bristol supervised by Tim Burness. His research is in group theory, and lots of his work involves exploiting the fundamental role of simple groups, the building blocks of symmetry. Scott was awarded the gold medal at STEM for Britain in parliament last year for his research in group theory. His paper (with Tim Burness and Robert Guralnick) published in Annals of Mathematics (arxiv preprint) proved some long-standing questions about the generation of finite groups, including the question: “In which finite groups is every nontrivial element contained in a generating pair?”
We wish Scott every success in his future research.