School of Mathematical Sciences
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
Who I am:
I am currently a Reader in Mathematics
at Queen Mary, University of London, where I have been working since September 2020. From January 2012 to August 2020 I held a permanent position at the University of Surrey, first as Lecturer and then as Senior Lecturer, and previously to that I held postdoctoral positions at
the University of Rome Tor Vergata, at the University of Warwick, at
the University of Manchester, and at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in
Vienna. Still earlier I studied at Warwick for my undergraduate
degree and received my PhD in 2006 from the University of Manchester
where I was supervised by Dr. Charles Walkden.
At Queen Mary I am currently the director of the Mathematics MSc, the deputy director of postgraduate research studies, and the official local representative of the London Mathematical Society.
My core area of mathematical expertise is ergodic theory, but a recurring theme in my research has been the application of ergodic theory to problems in other areas of mathematical analysis. At various times this has included fractal geometry, the joint spectral characteristics of sets of matrices and linear operators, the analysis of number-theoretic algorithms and the metric geometry of measurable subsets of the plane. In the last few years I have been particularly engaged in developing the thermodynamic formalism of linear cocycles, motivated principally by its applications to the dimension theory of self-affine fractals and non-conformal repelling sets. More recently I have developed interests in the general properties of fiber-bunched linear cocycles and in the use of ergodic theory to understand marginal instability phenomena in switched differential and difference equations.
I would be interested to hear from potential PhD students who would like to study any of these topics, especially if from the perspective of ergodic theory.
My Erdős number is 3, by three routes: Morris → Hare → Shallit → Erdős; Morris → Lee → Vaughan → Erdős; and Morris → Jenkinson → Mauldin → Erdős.
Who I am not:
More people share my name than you might expect:
Ian Matthew Morris is Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University and, among other things, wrote the popular history book “Why the West Rules — For Now” which I quite enjoyed reading. Occasionally people email me to ask questions about it.
Ian David Morris is also a historian, this time specialising in early Islamic history. He has worked at the University of St. Andrews and at the Spanish National Research Council.
Ian David Morris was a professor at Hull-York Medical School, where I understand that he specialised in the study of DNA damage. At one point he and I were simultaneously based at the University of Manchester, where I occasionally received his mail.
Ian D. Morris was a rabbi at Sinai Synagogue in Leeds. I believe that he is the author of a dissertation on the use of humour in Midrash Rabbah, the authorship of which has occasionally been attributed to me by automated search engines despite the fact that at the time he wrote it, I was five years old. At some point I will probably attempt to read it.
Ifor Morris, formerly of Bangor University in Wales, was the author of several publications dealing with graph theory and related matters.
Grants held:
September 2017 - July 2022: Principal Investigator for Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant RPG-2016-194 "Lower bounds for Lyapunov exponents", £267,776.
July 2014 - June 2016: Principal Investigator for EPSRC First Grant EP/L026953/1, "Distributional analysis of GCD algorithms via the ergodic theory of random dynamical systems", £91,795.
Postgraduate and postdoctoral supervision:
Jonah Varney has been my PhD student since September 2018 and is anticipated to graduate in 2022. His thesis is concerned with marginal instability of discrete linear inclusions and of fibre-bunched linear cocycles.
Natalia Jurga worked with me as a postdoctoral research associate supported by my Leverhulme Trust grant from April 2018 to April 2020. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate at St. Andrews (where she is part of an EPSRC-funded project led by Prof. Jonathan Fraser) and was recently awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.
Argyrios Christodoulou worked with me as a postdoctoral research associate supported by my Leverhulme Trust grant from November 2019 to September 2021.
Errata:
My earlier preprint “Dominated splittings for semi-invertible operator cocycles on Hilbert space” (arXiv 1403.0824) contained a critical error and I encourage researchers not to cite it.
Research:
At the time of writing my publications are as follows:
On dense intermingling of exact overlaps and the open set condition.
