Bio
Jacek Brodzki is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Southampton and an expert in topology, topological data analysis, and has strong interests and experience in direct applications of pure mathematics. He has gained his DPhil in Pure Mathematics at Oxford under the guidance of Daniel Quillen. At Southampton, he has created and leads a research group in applied topology that investigates theoretical foundations and applications of topological data analysis, including applications in medicine, biology, computer science, and chemistry. He has a very considerable experience in leading interdisciplinary projects based on applications of pure mathematics.
He is the PI of the EPSRC-sponsored project "Joining the Dots: From Data to Insight" which forges connections between topological data analysis, machine learning and statistics with emphasis on applications to complex problems in the sciences and medicine. He is a co-founder and Director of the Centre for Geometry, Topology and Applications at Southampton. This new initiative will create a focus for research in the area of overlap between Geometry, Topology, with a strong interest in applications and will serve as a point of contact for future collaborations.
Research interests
The modern world thrives on data. While we still tend to think of data as numbers, most of the data created in modern science, medicine, biology, in digital economy, in commerce, digital security is vastly more varied: it can be a set of images, a collection of objects, or a dynamic profile of an evolving system, it can be sound or video recordings, it can take the form of tweets, or posts on discussion forums.
A common thread in modern data science is the analysis, classification and comparison of complex shapes. This is why topology, a branch of mathematics dedicated to the study of shape, is so useful in this context. It has been developed to provide numerical characteristics that allow the classification and comparison of complex structures. Its flexibility, computational power, and impressive visualisation tools have been used in recent breakthrough results in the study of cancer, asthma, chronic lung diseases, and many others.
Jacek Brodzki is interested in developing new applications of topological ideas as well as foundational research into the methodology itself. His current research interests include the study of the uses of topology to detect efficient architectures of neural networks.