Emeritus Professor, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford

Professor John Ockendon is Emeritus Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine's College. His research interests include differential equations, mathematical modelling, and industrial applications.

His abiding interests concern the application of innovative mathematical ideas to real-world problems, and especially the use of these ideas to unify and simplify complicated and disparate physical situations.

Professor Ockendon's background was centred on fluid mechanics, starting with hypersonic aerodynamics, creeping flow, sloshing and channel flows and leading to flows in porous media, ship hydrodynamics and models for flow separation. An increasing involvement with industrial research quickly led him into the burgeoning area of free and moving boundary problems. Other industrial collaboration has led to new ideas for lens design, fibre manufacture, extensional and surface-tension-driven flows and glass manufacture, fluidised-bed models, semiconductor device modelling and a range of other problems in mechanics and heat and mass transfer, especially scattering and ray theory, nonlinear wave propagation, nonlinear oscillations, nonlinear diffusion and impact in solids and liquids.

In the physical sciences, he has maintained a strong interest in materials science, especially elastoplasticity, dislocation modelling, sound waves in solids, dendritic growth and superconductivity; and in earth sciences, he has interests in gravimetry, core modelling, dune migration, and vulcanism. All his work continues to be centred on the application of techniques such as complex variable theory, asymptotic analysis and, above all, theories for solving partial differential equations in new, but well-found models in the real world.

Professor Ockendon organised the annual meeting of the Study Groups with Industry from 1972 to 1989. These meetings are now held regularly in many countries as well as the UK. As a Research Director of OCIAM (Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) since its inception to 2008, he has tried to foster a completely open minded and interactive approach to research. As Chairman of the Smith Institute's Scientific Research Committee from 2001 to 2009, he was kept abreast of the exciting new mathematical stimuli that are continually generated by industry and commerce. From 2008-2010, he was the first Director of OCCAM, the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics.