Dr Bridget Webb

Professional biography

Bridget's undergraduate and postgraduate studies were at UEA (BSc in Chemistry and Mathematics and PhD in Pure Mathematics). She joined the Open University in 1995 as a lecturer in Pure Maths, after a tutorship at Exeter University.

Research interests

Bridget's research interests lie in the overlap of design theory and graph theory, where her interest in the symmetry of objects also leads to the study of automorphisms and permutation groups. Most of her research falls under the following three headings: 

• Infinite designs
• Latin squares
• Combinatorial designs.

Infinite designs

Most work on design theory has an implicit (if not explicit) assumption of finiteness; removing this assumption leads to topics in infinite design theory, which, although part of set theory, is very combinatorial in nature. Infinite designs are particularly interesting because many ideas and techniques from finite design theory may be applied with only minor modifications where necessary, yet in other ways they behave very differently to finite designs. Bridget has published several papers on infinite designs, including one, written jointly with Prof. Peter Cameron (QMUL), that gives the definitive definition. 

Latin squares

Latin squares are ubiquous structures which have recently gained much public interest through the popularity of Sudoku, which are one particular type of Latin square. Despite centuries of study, there are still surprisingly many basic problems remaining unanswered. 

Combinatorial designs

Work in design theory includes research on permutations and automorphisms of designs, configurations in designs, Steiner triple systems and graph decompositions.

Current work involves countably infinite homogeneous Steiner triple systems and subsystems of Netto triple systems.