Browse by subject

PhD opportunities: Pure Mathematics

Compare 16 doctoral research opportunities connected with Pure Mathematics, including project summaries, funding and application deadlines.

Pure Mathematics

PhD Studentship: Microlocal analysis and its applications in quantum resonances, partial differential equations with analytic or Gevrey regularity, and several complex variables

University of Birmingham

Microlocal analysis explores the classical/quantum correspondence in partial differential equations (PDEs). For example, the concept of symbol quantisation in the theory of pseudodifferential operators links classical observables (functions on phase space) with quantum operators.

Location
Birmingham, United Kingdom
Deadline
22 October 2026
Funding
Funded PhD Project (UK Students Only)

Pure Mathematics

Ranks and types in positive logic (KIRBYJ_U27EMPSFPF)

University of East Anglia

About the Project Primary Supervisor: Dr Jonathan Kirby Model theory is traditionally done with “classical first-order logic”, the logic which allows unlimited use of the operators AND, OR, NOT, with the EXISTS and FOR ALL quantifiers. More recently, positive logic has emerged as a useful generalisation.

Location
Norwich, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
30 November 2026
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

Representation theory and Categorification (MIEMIETZV_U27EMPSFPF)

University of East Anglia

About the Project Primary Supervisor: Prof Vanessa Miemietz Categorification has led to major advances in representation theory in the last 30 years, including the proof of Broué’s abelian defect group conjecture for symmteric groups and the proof of the Kazhdan—Lusztig conjectures for all Coxeter types. Classically, a representation of an algebra (a ring that is also a vector space) is an action of the latter on a vector space via linear maps.

Location
Norwich, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
30 November 2026
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

Algebraic groups and Lie algebras

University of Birmingham

About the Project Projects available in a range of topics in representation theory and Lie theory. These are centred around questions in the representation theory of Lie algebras and algebraic groups and are likely to involve a blend of algebraic, combinatorial and geometric methods.

Location
Birmingham, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Competition Funded PhD Project (UK Students Only)

Pure Mathematics

Algebraic topology and graphs

University of Aberdeen

About the Project These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying. Graphs are among the most basic combinatorial objects studied in mathematics, consisting simply of a collection of objects and connections among them.

Location
Aberdeen, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Dr Richard Hepworth-Young Dr M Grant

Pure Mathematics

Boundary Value Problems for Clifford-Analytic Operators on Singular Domains

University of Aberdeen

About the Project These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying. This PhD project is at the intersection of complex analysis, partial differential equations, and geometric analysis.

Location
Aberdeen, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

Coarse Geometry of Groups and Spaces

University of Birmingham

About the Project The algebraic properties of groups are intricately linked with the geometric properties of the spaces they act on. For infinite groups, there are typically many choices of "natural" actions on geometric spaces. While these spaces may be locally very different, they have the same coarse (large-scale) structure.

Location
Birmingham, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Competition Funded PhD Project (UK Students Only)

Pure Mathematics

Coarse geometry of groups with bi-invariant metrics

University of Aberdeen

About the Project These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying. Coarse geometry is the study of asymptotic properties of metric spaces.

Location
Aberdeen, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

Coarse homotopy groups and large scale geometry of groups with bi-invariant metrics

University of Aberdeen

About the Project These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying. Following Gromov, this project is concerned with coarse geometry of metric spaces.

Location
Aberdeen, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

Combinatorial Representation Theory: Partitions and Basic Sets

University of Aberdeen

About the Project These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying. The representation theory of many families of finite groups can be presented in terms of combinatorial objects.

Location
Aberdeen, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

Extremal graph theory

University of Birmingham

About the Project Extremal graph theory is one of the most active and dynamic branches of combinatorics. The fundamental goal of the area is to understand what conditions force a graph to contain some substructure. For example, Mantel’s theorem – proved more than a century ago – determines how many edges a graph on n vertices needs to guarantee it contains a triangle.

Location
Birmingham, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Competition Funded PhD Project (UK Students Only)

Pure Mathematics

Interactions between higher categories and homological algebra

University of Aberdeen

About the Project These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying.

Location
Aberdeen, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

Probabilistic combinatorics

University of Birmingham

About the Project The probabilistic method is a powerful tool which has been especially influential in the fields of combinatorics and computer science. In the context of combinatorics, this method was pioneered by Erdős, who demonstrated that random constructions could often be effective in settings where explicit constructions are infeasible.

Location
Birmingham, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Funded PhD Project (UK Students Only)

Pure Mathematics

Representation theory of Lie algebras and quantum groups

University of Aberdeen

About the Project These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying. Lie algebras originally appeared in the work of the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie as infinitesimal symmetries of geometric objects called nowadays manifolds.

Location
Aberdeen, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

The space of maps between classifying spaces

University of Aberdeen

About the Project These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying. The theory of p-local groups developed by C. Broto, R. Levi and B.

Location
Aberdeen, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only

Pure Mathematics

Tomographic Inequalities

University of Birmingham

About the Project The main objectives in this project are tomographic operators such as X-ray transform and Radon transform. By investigating the Lp-boundedness properties, we will study the smoothing properties of these operators.

Location
Birmingham, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline
Year-round applications
Funding
Self-Funded PhD Students Only