Ursula Martin

Ursula Martin joined Wadham in January 2016. She holds an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship, and is currently a Visiting Professor in Mathematics in Oxford, following her retirement in 2018  from her previous role as Professor of Computer Science.

Prior to this she held  a chair of Computer Science in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London.

At Queen Mary she was Vice-Principal for Science and Engineering (2005-2009), and Director of the impactQM project (2009-2012). She served on the U K Defence Science Advisory Council, on the 2001 and 2008  UK HEFCE RAE panel for Computer Science, and was a SICSA distinguished visitor at the University of Edinburgh for 2012-13. She has previously held appointments at the University of St Andrews (the first female professor in any discipline since its foundation in 1411), Royal Holloway University of London, Manchester and Urbana Champaign.

She holds an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge and a PhD in Mathematics from Warwick. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in January 2012 and was elected to the Fellowship  of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017.

Ursula continues work on her project to understand the creation and influence of mathematics, working with philosophers, social scientists and computer scientists.

She has also been working on the mathematics of Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), celebrated as “the first programmer” for her remarkable 1843 paper which explained Charles Babbage’s designs for a mechanical computer.

She directed the symposium and exhibition Ada Lovelace-Celebrating 200 years of a computer visionary. Find out more.

In 2012 she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2017 was elected to the Fellowship  of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and awarded a  Doctor of Science honoris causa by  the University of London.

Meagher, Laura R. and Martin, Ursula, 2017 Slightly dirty maths: The richly textured mechanisms of impact  Research Evaluation 26: 15-27

Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice, The early mathematical education of Ada Lovelace, BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, online first June 2017

Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice, The Lovelace-De Morgan Mathematical Correspondence: A Critical Re-Appraisal, Historia Mathematica, online first May 2017

Ada Lovelace's Mathematical Papers, Clay Mathematics Institute