Three St Andrews University academics have been recognised in the King’s New Year Honours.
And it’s a double celebration for school of mathematics.
St Andrews Regulus Chair of Mathematics, Professor Kenneth Falconer, is awarded a CBE for services to mathematics.
And Colva Mary Roney-Dougal, Professor of pure mathematics, is given an OBE for services to education and mathematics.
Meanwhile St Andrews University Modern History Professor Andrew Pettigree receives a CBE for services to literature in the New Year Honours list.
Professor Kenneth Falconer is a world leader
Professor Falconer is a world-leader in fractal geometry, an area of mathematics concerned with shapes that have detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales.
He has been Professor of Pure Mathematics at St Andrews for 30 years.
And he was appointed Regius Chair of Mathematics by the Queen in 2017.
Three years later, he was awarded the London Mathematical Society Shephard Prize for his many original and profound results in fractal geometry.
He has written more than 130 papers and five books, one of which has become a seminal text.
Kenneth’s broader contributions to mathematics include serving on the Council of the London Mathematical Society and organising research programmes in Cambridge and Stockholm.
Professor Andrew Pettegree has written 16 books
Andrew Pettegree is Professor of Modern History.
He is also director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, an online bibliography of all books published in the first age of print, 1450-1700.
He is the author of sixteen books in the fields of reformation history and the history of communication.
They include Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion, The Book in the Renaissance and The Invention of News.
The Book at War, a study of the relationship between books and warfare, was published in autumn 2023.
Andrew has taught at St Andrews since 1986 and founded both the St Andrews Reformation Institute and the St Andrews Book History Research Group.
And he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2021.
Professor Colva Mary Roney-Dougal appears on popular radio shows
Colva Mary Roney-Dougal is a Professor of Pure Mathematics, specialising in group theory and computational algebra.
And she is Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra at St Andrews.
She is also known for her popularisation of mathematics on BBC radio shows.
She has made several appearances on In Our Time about the mathematics of Emmy Noether and Pierre-Simon Laplace.
And she has appeared on The Infinite Monkey Cage about the nature of infinity and numbers in the real world, as well as Stephen Fry’s BBC Radio 4 programme Fry’s English Delight.
Roney-Dougal completed her PhD at the University of London in 2001.
With John Bray and Derek Holt, she is the co-author of the much-cited book The Maximal Subgroups of the Low-Dimensional Finite Classical Groups.
In 2015 she was given the inaugural Cheryl E. Praeger Visiting Research Fellowship, funding her to visit the University of Western Australia.
Conversation