Meet our staff

Using mathematics to solve industrial problems.

“There are two places you can look for new mathematical ideas; one is just digging deeper into existing mathematics and the other is to go out and look for new phenomena, and industry is full of those.

I’ve always been fascinated by numbers, patterns and understanding how things work, which has led to my study of Mathematics and, in particular, Industrial Mathematics. This involves working with industry to use existing mathematics and develop new mathematics to address the challenges they are currently facing.

Using mathematical techniques suggested by data science is another way to solve real-world problems. Data science is a sector that is rapidly growing, data analysts are used in virtually industry from retail to healthcare. Most people think it is all about computing, but in fact it is uses several areas of mathematics which until recently were considered “pure maths”. I love to show my students how mathematical tools can extract meaning from the data and how they can be used to find hidden patterns. As a maths graduate you can find employment in a huge range of data science areas such as looking for diseases in medical images, predicting economic patterns through financial modelling, predicting climate change and environmental events, detecting faults in sensors in industrial equipment or even helping with film animation.

Here at Huddersfield we have set up a new Centre for Mathematics and Data Science. I’ve been really impressed by the students here and in particular those participating in the Enterprise Design Challenge.

I had a chance to wander round as a judge, meet the teams and ask them about their work. I was amazed by what they had achieved in so short a time. As with many academics I love the “aha” moment when a student gets a concept. I also enjoy it when students are learning a new mathematical techniques and ask me what they will ever use it for: that’s a great excuse to talk about some of the work I’ve done with industry and explain how differential equations can be used to model coffee brewing, or how integrals can be used to describe the moulding of contact lenses.”

Professor William Lee Department of Computer Science