Tomorrow's Mathematicians Today: Abby Saynor
Congratulations to undergraduate student Abby Saynor, who was accepted to present her research at the Tomorrow's Mathematicians Today conference this year.
Example images of one- and two-dimensional opinion trajectories
Each year, the School of Mathematics offers funded opportunities to undergraduate students to experience research in the mathematical sciences.
Abby Saynor, now a third year student on the MSci Mathematics degree programme, was jointly supported by the School of Mathematics together with an Undergraduate Research Bursary from the London Mathematical Society to undertake a research project with Dr Galane Luo in Summer 2024, on Conditions for Oscillating Solutions in Opinion Dynamics.
Congratulations to Abby, who was accepted to speak on her research at the twelfth Undergraduate Mathematics Conference Tomorrow's Mathematicians Today (TMT), which took place on 14-16 March 2025.
Modelling how a population’s opinions change over time is an intriguing and growing area of mathematics. It describes how a population may reach a certain state over time, such as a consensus, a segregation or possibly an oscillating solution.
Opinion dynamics models can also be applied in other areas such as bird flocks and recommender systems. Abby's research involved generalising existing models, and determining the conditions required for oscillating solutions to occur in such models.
As well as speaking about her results at the 2025 TMT conference for undergraduate mathematics students, Abby will also have the opportunity to submit her work for publication as part of a collaborative paper.
Doing a summer research project has been a great experience for me, I enjoyed working with my supervisor to explore a new and interesting area of maths. I had not done anything like this before and I was worried that maths research may not be suitable for me, but I was pleasantly surprised by the experience and outcomes of this project. I have been able to make use of my existing skills, and I believe that doing this research project has given me some new and valuable skills. This project helped me make the decision to transfer from the BSc to the MSci course and I am looking forward to my fourth-year project.
Images produced by Dr Galane Luo for "Extremism, segregation and oscillatory states emerge through collective opinion dynamics in a novel agent-based model" (joint with B. M. Stokes, S. E. Jackson and P. Garnett, 2002, published in The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 48(1), pp. 42–80. doi: 10.1080/0022250X.2022.2124246).