OUPPS (Open University People Profile System)

Biography

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.

Projects

Travel to Australia

The overarching aim of this proposal is to make significant progress towards classifying homogeneous and set-homogeneous Steiner triple systems. In doing so, it will not only investigate possible amalgamation classes of Steiner triple systems, but will also investigate the subgroup structure of two classes of finite designs. Another aspect of this proposal is the decomposition of infinite circulant graphs into infinite Hamiltonian paths which builds on previous work by Webb and the researchers at The University of Queensland.

Visit of Brett Stevens (XM-13-051-BW)

Brett Stevens (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada) will be in Europe on sabbatical during the academic year 2013/14, this provides an ideal opportunity to invite Brett to give lectures at UK institutions without incurring the costs associated with a transatlantic visit. Both Bridget Webb (OU) and Leonard Soicher (QMUL) are currently collaborating with Brett and the intention is that this visit will also initiate collaborations with Stephanie Perkins and her research group (University of South Wales). All three institutions have active combinatorics groups and several researchers interested in Brett’s work on designs, arrays and codes, so his visit and the three (or more) lectures will be highly beneficial to each institution. Brett will speak at the Open University Winter Combinatorics meeting rather than a usual internal seminar slot. In this way, his talk will be accessible to a far wider audience, including all those who would normally attend an internal seminar. This lecture visit, in addition to giving an opportunity for wide participation from researchers at the three institutions and many others, will provide a great opportunity for the core researchers to further their current work, start new projects (possibly altogether) and will foster new collaborations with the researchers at South Wales.