Email: fowler@maths.ox.ac.uk

Personal Biography

I graduated from Corpus in 1974 with a first class degree in mathematics, my tutor at that time being the renowned Jim Murray. I continued on to complete a doctoral thesis in 1977 under the supervision of Alan Tayler, on the subject of glacier dynamics. Following this, I held postdoctoral positions at Trinity College Dublin, and then at M.I.T., where I stayed for five years, latterly as Assistant Professor. In 1984, a job came up in Oxford, and, such opportunities being rare, I applied for the lectureship and took it up in 1985, together with a Tutorial Fellowship at Corpus, where I in fact succeeded my former mentor. I remained in post for 22 years, until an unmissable opportunity arose at the University of Limerick where I am now largely based, having taken up the post of Stokes Professor in November 2007, acting as a kind of guru to the newly-formed (and well-funded) Mathematics Consortium for Science and Industry (MACSI). Meanwhile I retain links with Oxford, where I still help run the seminar on Mathematical Geoscience, and enjoy continuing collaborative research with my colleagues. In Corpus, I have been elected as a Senior Research Fellow, and indeed, I am indulging my release from teaching to advance my research in the way academics dream of. The down side of my advancement is the consequent frequent travel between Ireland and England.

Research 

Most of my research lies in the general area of mathematical geoscience. I am an applied mathematician, essentially interested in any scientific problem which commands quantitative explanation. My thesis work on glaciology has led to a lifelong interest in the subject, and over the years this has led to an interest in geophysics, including mantle convection, magma transport, and more recently volcanology. Additionally I have become interested in geomorphology, and have done research on the mechanisms of river formation, drumlin formation, and the spiral canyons on the Martian north polar ice cap. Other than geoscience, I have worked on industrially important problems, such as two-phase flow and alloy solidification, and also on physiological problems, particularly respiration and blood cell diseases. My current concerns include Strombolian volcanic eruptions, drumlin formation, Liesegang rings and layered igneous intrusions. I have recently finished a book on chaos, with my long time collaborator Mark McGuinness.

Books

Fowler, A.C. 1997 Mathematical models in the applied sciences. C.U.P., Cambridge.

Fowler, A. 2011 Mathematical geoscience. Springer-Verlag, London.

Fowler, A. and M. McGuinness 2019 Chaos: an introduction for applied mathematicians. Springer Nature, Switzerland.

Fowler, A.and F. Ng (eds.) 2020 Glaciers and ice sheets in the climate system: the Karthaus summer school lecture notes. Springer-Verlag, in press.

Recent Papers

Fowler, A.C. 2019 Phase transition in the Boltzmann-Vlasov equation. J. Stat. Phys. 174 (5), 1,011-1,026.

Fannon, J.S., I.R. Moyles and A.C. Fowler 2019 Application of the compressible I-dependent rheology to granular chute flow instability. J. Fluid Mech. 864, 1,026-1,057.

Fowler, A.C. 2019 The scientific legacy of George Gabriel Stokes. In: George Gabriel Stokes: Life, Science and Faith, eds. M. McCartney, A. Whitaker and A. Wood, pp. 197-216. O.U.P., Oxford.

Duley, J.M., A.C. Fowler, I.R. Moyles and S.B.G. O'Brien 2019 Regularisation of the Ostwald supersaturation model for Liesegang bands. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A475, 20190154.

Benn, D.I., A.C. Fowler, I. Hewitt and H. Sevestre 2019 A general theory of glacier surges. J. Glaciol. 65 (253), 701-716.