Following the birth of my son in 2020, I am working reduced hours until August 2022. I am spending the Autumn semester of 2021 on leave in Helsinki, but will return to Manchester for the spring semester of 2022, where I will continue to teach Metric Spaces and Fractal Geometry. I will not be supervising any undergraduate projects for this time, and will be more selective about the refereeing work that I take on. Please feel free to get in touch by email as usual (thomas.kempton@manchester.ac.uk).
About Me:
I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester working in the
dynamical systems group. You can find our seminar webpage
here.
My main interests lie in applications of thermodynamic formalism to problems in fractal geometry and number theory, and in particular in the study of Bernoulli convolutions and self-affine sets.
Fringe interests include percolation and the graph reconstruction conjecture. My research is partially funded by EPSRC grant
EP/T010835/1
Previously I was an EPSRC funded postdoc at the University of St Andrews working with
Kenneth Falconer and before that I worked with
Karma Dajani at the
University of Utrecht. I completed my PhD at the University of Warwick in March 2011 under the
supervision of
Mark Pollicott.
My
thesis was on thermodynamic
formalism for symbolic dynamical systems.
I'm originally from Derby and have also lived in Coventry, Utrecht, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Thessaloniki and Manchester. I regularly take part in
Parkrun and am currently struggling to learn the Greek language. My wife
Aspa is currently a senior researcher at the VATT Institute for Economic Research in Helsinki.
Publications and Preprints:
Please see
here for my publications and preprints. Click
here for
my Google Scholar profile.
PhD and Postdoc Opportunities:
I'm keen to supervise PhD students, either as a sole supervisor or jointly with other members of the dynamical systems group. If you are thinking about doing a PhD at Manchester then please get in touch. The school has various
sources of funding including a number of fully funded EPSRC scholarships. Please drop me an email if you think you might be interested.
I'm also keen to supervise postdocs, please get in touch if you think you might like to work with me. As well as the usual national sources of funding that we might apply for, EPSRC funded PhD students could apply for the one year
EPSRC Doctoral Prize, and citizens of certain countries could apply to work for the
Heilbronn Institute at Manchester, supervised by me.
I currently mentor two postdocs,
Lawrence Lee is an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow and
Leticia Pardo Simon is the Manchester Mathematics Fellow.
My PhD student Alexandros Batsis successfully defended his thesis in November 2021. I previously mentored
Demi Allen for a one year doctoral prize fellowship at Manchester, Demi went on to hold postdoc positions at the Heilbronn institute and at Warwick before starting a lectureship at Exeter.
Teaching:
I teach Metric Spaces and Fractal Geometry, both of which take place during the Spring semester. Full course information can be found on blackboard.
Outreach and Public Engagement:
I run
Mathsbombe, an online maths competition aimed primarily at students up to Year 13 (England and Wales), S6 (Scotland), Year 14 (Northern Ireland). You can find questions that I have written
here,
here,
here,
here,
here and
here.
I also take part in
Science X and the
Alan Turing Cryptography Day.
Conference and Meeting Organisation:
Together with
Thomas Jordan and
Mark Holland I organise the UK
One Day Ergodic Theory Meetings, funded by an LMS Scheme 3 grant. We also run a mailing list with announcements relevant to UK ergodic theory (including links for the online meetings)
here.
Together with
Solly Coles,
Natalia Jurga and
Lawrence Lee I run the UK 'Junior Ergodic Theory Seminar', a series of meetings primarily aimed at UK based PhD students and postdocs in ergodic theory. You can join the mailing list
here. With a similar set of organisers (without Lawrence but including
Rhiannon Dougall) I am organising a
winter school in ergodic theory at ICMS.
Together with
Xiong Jin and
Jon Fraser I am organising a fractals conference at
ICMS Edinburgh. This event is currently being rescheduled.
Tom Kempton
School of Mathematics
The University of Manchester
Manchester
M13 9PL
United Kingdom
Office number 2.218
thomas.kempton@manchester.ac.uk
0044 161 3063683
