John Toland (mathematician)

John Francis Toland (born April 28, 1949 in Derry ) is a Northern Irish mathematician who deals with analysis and partial differential equations and hydrodynamics.

Toland attended St. Columb's College in Derry from 1960 to 1967 and then studied at Queens University in Belfast (bachelor's degree) and at the University of Sussex (master's degree), where he received his doctorate in 1973 from Charles A. Stuart (Topological Methods for Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problems). He then worked at the University of Essex in the Fluids Mechanics Research Center until 1979 and then at University College London . He has been a professor at the University of Bath since the early 1980s and is also Scientific Director of the International Center for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) in Edinburgh . Among other things, he was visiting professor in Germany, the USA, France, the Netherlands and Australia.

Among other things, he dealt with the mathematical theory of stationary water waves, partly with Charles Amick (University of Chicago), who died in 1991. In 1978 he proved a conjecture by George Gabriel Stokes about the existence of gravity waves of maximum height in deep water (On the Existence of a Wave of Greatest Height and Stokes's Conjecture, Proc.Royal Society, Vol. 363, p. 469), one over 100 An open problem of hydrodynamics for years. Here he worked with John Bryce McLeod and LE Fraenkel. In the laudation for his admission to the Royal Society, his fundamental contributions to the global bifurcation theory of differential equations and his discovery of a new principle of duality in the calculus of variations were highlighted. In his investigations he also used topological methods newly developed by himself and his co-authors.

In 2000 he received the Senior Berwick Prize for the work The index change and global bifurcation for flows with a first integral (with E. Norman Dancer, in Proc. LMS. Volume 36. 1993, pp. 539-567). He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1999 , receiving the Wolfson Merit Award. From 2005 to 2007 he was President of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). In 2009 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex. In 2012 he received the New Year's Eve Medal from the Royal Society.

Web links

• Laudation as an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex
• Laudation on St. Columb
• Laudation on the occasion of admission to the Royal Society