Henry Bradford is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in pure mathematics. He joined Christ's in September 2019.
Henry is a specialist in group theory: the study of symmetries of mathematical objects. An “object” in this context might mean a geometric shape, a chemical molecule, a mechanical system, or something more abstract like an algebraic structure. All systems that mathematicians are interested in understanding are in some sense highly symmetric, so group theory touches every other branch of mathematics. One of the major movements in modern group theory is the study of symmetry in terms of the "Cayley graph" construction. A Cayley graph is a network which provides a visual representation of the symmetries of a mathematical object. The aim is to relate structural properties of these networks to the mathematical properties of the objects whose symmetries they describe.
Henry received both his MMath and DPhil from St John's College Oxford. During this time he was also a College Lecturer at St Catherine's College Oxford. After a short spell as Director of Studies in Mathematics at Trinity Hall, he moved to the University of Göttingen in 2016. In Autumn 2018 he was a visiting fellow at the Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.