Thomas Ward

Thomas Ward (born 3 October 1963) is a British mathematician, currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Education at the University of Leeds, who works in ergodic theory and dynamical systems and its relations to number theory.

Ward attended Woodlands Primary School in Lusaka, and Waterford Kamhlaba United World College in Swaziland. He studied Mathematics at the University of Warwick from 1982, gaining a PhD under the supervision of Klaus Schmidt in 1989.

Ward worked at the University of Maryland in College Park, the Ohio State University, and the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he moved to Durham University as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, and in 2016 to the University of Leeds as Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Education. He served in editorial roles for the London Mathematical Society from 2002 to 2012 and was a managing editor of Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems from 2012 to 2014. He served on the HEFCE advisory committees for Widening Participation and Student Opportunity (2013-15) and Teaching Excellence and Student Opportunity (2015-17)

In 2012 Ward, along with Graham Everest (posthumously) was awarded the Paul R. Halmos - Lester R. Ford Award for A Repulsion Motif in Diophantine Equations printed in the American Mathematical Monthly.

Selected papers

• with Klaus Schmidt: Mixing automorphisms of compact groups and a theorem of Schlickewei, Invent. Math. 111 (1993), no. 1, 69–76
• with Qing Zhang: The Abramov-Rokhlin entropy addition formula for amenable group actions, Monatsh. Math. 114 (1992), no. 3-4, 317–329
• with Douglas Lind and Klaus Schmidt: Mahler measure and entropy for commuting automorphisms of compact groups, Invent. Math. 101 (1990), no. 3, 593–629
• with Douglas Lind: Automorphisms of solenoids and p-adic entropy, Ergodic Theory Dynam. Systems 8 (1988), no. 3, 411–419

Books

• with Manfred Einsiedler: Functional Analysis, Spectral Theory, and Applications, Springer Verlag (2017)

• with Manfred Einsiedler: Ergodic Theory with a view towards Number Theory, Springer Verlag (2011)

• with Graham Everest: An Introduction to Number Theory, Springer Verlag (2005)

• with Graham Everest, Alf van der Poorten, and Igor Shparlinski: Recurrence Sequences, American Math. Society (2003)

• with Graham Everest: Heights of Polynomials and Entropy in Algebraic Dynamics, Springer Verlag (1999)