Mathematical people: Roger Heath-Brown

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Roger Heath-Brown (37) is a Reader in Pure Mathematics at Oxford University, and a Tutorial Fellow at Magdalen College. He works in analytic number theory, with interests covering the distribution of prime numbers, Waring's problem and Fermat's Last Theorem

This term I'm giving a first year lecture course—Groups, Rings and Fields. I'm not at my best at 9 am and despite my efforts the undergraduates find me rather dull. The weaker ones have to have everything spelled out in full, with the result that the interesting things are too sparsely scattered for the stronger students. I'm back in college by 10.30 am having collected a pile of mail. There's a request from the Mathematical Gazette for a “day in the life of” style article, and I toy with the idea of describing an occasion on which a journal asks me to describe a typical day's work …. I also receive a referee's report on a paper submitted to me as an editorial advisor to the London Mathematical Society. The report is not encouraging and I reject the paper—a frequent enough duty, but not one I relish. The associated paperwork fills the next three-quarters of an hour. This particular manuscript is rather too similar to something published in 1963. While double-checking this in “Reviews in Number Theory” I notice an abstract of a quite unrelated paper, by a Finnish mathematician.