The Boston Consulting Group applies insights from a variety of academic disciplines to the strategic challenges facing business and society.

Boston  Consulting Group

The Centre for Defence Enterprise funds innovative research that could lead to a capability advantage for armed forces and national security.

Centre for  Defence Enterprise

The U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency makes pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.

Defence Advanced  Research Projects Agency

The U.S. Defence Threat Reduction Agency funds research to prepare for and combat weapons of mass destruction and improvised threats.

Defence Threat  Reduction Agency

The European Innovation Council funds world-class scientists and innovators to develop and accelerate disruptive technology businesses.

European  Innovation Council

Future and Emerging Technologies, part of the EU science agency FP7, funds research on high-risk, high-reward technologies of the future.

FP7 Future and  Emerging Technologies

Information and Communication Technologies, part of the EU science agency FP7, funds research on devices and applications that rely on information.

FP7 Information and Communication Technologies

The Garfield Weston Foundation supports a range of charities across the UK and the restoration and redevelopment of their buildings.

Garfield Weston  Foundation

Future and Emerging Technologies, part of the EU science agency H2020, funds research on high-risk, high-reward technologies of the future.

Horizon 2020 Future, Emerging Technologies

Invenia is a company of scientists and engineers that uses machine learning to optimize complex decision making and reduce inefficiencies.

Invenia Labs

LIMS Ventures is the start-up incubator of the London Institute which accelerates projects with potential for widespread commercialization.

LIMS Ventures

The U.S. Office of Naval Research supports basic research and technology for future naval power and the preservation of national security.

Office of  Naval Research

The Pilgrim Trust supports the preservation of architecturally important buildings and historically significant artifacts and documents.

Pilgrim Trust

The Porter Foundation supports projects in education, the environment, culture, health and welfare that encourage excellence and innovation.

Porter Foundation

The Rose Foundation provides financial assistance to charities undertaking building restoration and development in and around London.

Rose Foundation

The Edward Harvist Trust supports organisations that improve the quality of life for local people in Westminster and other London boroughs.

Edward Harvist Trust

The European Commission Migration and Home Affairs supports research to ensure the security of the EU and cooperation with non-EU countries.

European Commission  Migration and Home Affairs

The London Institute for Mathematical Sciences

Thomas Fink argues that Britain’s track record of scientific leadership is the result of curiosity-driven research rather than EU funding.

Science and Brexit

A dinner and discussion about collective imagination, strategies for acting on multiple timescales and how to respond to distant threats.

Science of Business IV

On 2 Sep at 6pm, Marc Warner talks about how to manage the safety of embedded artificial intelligence in our Science and Society series.

Reigning in Skynet

We’ve captured the inside and outside of our building in a series of photographs which shows off the extensive renovation of the Institute.

Building in pictures

An overview of our past and present seminars, symposia, business dinners and other events can be found in our new Events page.

Events

Our research projects range from AI to materials to finance to cosmology. An overview of all of them is shown in our new Projects page.

Projects

At our 3rd Science of Business dinner we discuss innovation, technological change and new ways to combat climate change.

Business dinner

By tracking the tags of our research papers in real time, we provide a comprehensive overview of what we are working on and what’s new.

Research interests

In the Times Higher Education magazine, the London Institute argues that “We need to challenge the university monopoly on research”.

LIMS in THE

The London Institute has been awarded Independent Research Organization status and can now compete for £7bn of annual government funding.

Becoming an IRO

The distribution of product complexity helps explain why some technology sectors tend to exhibit faster innovation rates than others.

Faster innovation

A simple solvable model of memristive networks suggests an analogy between the asymptotic states of memristors and the Ising model.

Memristive networks

Sir John Beddington joins the Institute’s board of trustees, bringing experience in sustainability, science policy and scientific ventures.

New Trustee

Statistical physics harnesses links between maximum entropy and information theory to capture null model and real-world network features.

Network physics

Sir Roy Anderson joins the Institute’s board of trustees, bringing experience in defence, governance and mathematical bio-medicine.

You can help determine the most important research to advance. Any funds that you give for a project will be spent entirely on that project.

Kickscience

The mean dissipated work is proportional to a relative entropy between probability distributions over all possible values of work.

One-shot statistics

The distributions of size and shape of a material’s grains can be constructed from a 2D slice of the material and electron diffraction data.

Materials inference

Most simple rules give rise to simple behaviours. But occasionally they generate surprisingly rich and varied dynamics. Some simple rules, such as Conway’s game of life, are even equivalent to a universal Turing machine and can compute any computable function. While applying simple rules is easy, deducing the rules from observed behaviour is both important and usually hard, as evidenced by the deduction of the laws of physics through science.
In this project we investigate different families of simple rules for discrete dynamics. We help classify elementary cellular automata by deducing general characteristics of their behaviour. We study the self-assembly of polyominoes and the reverse engineering of structures made from them. In simple models of competition, mathematical models help us track the long-term behaviour of a population.
Reverse engineering simple rules that generate desired behaviour can help us design efficient algorithms and low-cost methods for manufacturing. Understanding which rules give rise to dynamics that are neither fully stable nor entirely chaotic may help design systems for artificial life and synthetic biology.

Understanding complex dynamical behaviours generated by simple rules, such as cellular automata, polyominoes and models of competition.

Surprising results of simple rules

Using ideas from statistical physics to reconstruct the average properties of financial networks from partial sets of information.

Reconstructing a credit network

To be sure of achieving a goal in the face of an uncertain future, individuals and organizations pursue plans that can cope with mistakes and unexpected events. One way of doing so is to choose a robust plan: one that is able to absorb any one setback and thereby achieve the goal with certainty. A different strategy is to choose a repairable plan: one that can be easily modified in the face of setbacks such that the goal is achieved, even though the original plan might have failed without modification.
In this project we develop a theory of systems that achieve resilience by being repairable instead of robust. Our approach is to minimize the typical cost of a workaround, averaged over all possible failure modes. We deduce design principles for easily repairable systems and show that repairability is a superior strategy whenever the number of failure modes is high.
Adopting a paradigm of repairability will increase the resilience of technologies and infrastructure to natural and man-made disasters when the next type of failure mode is hard to predict. This includes communication grids, transport networks and technologies for exploring space. It also suggests alternative strategies for sustainability in the face of environmental change.

Developing a new approach to resilience in which mistakes and unexpected events are mitigated by easy repairs rather than redundancy.

Surprising results of simple rules

The London Institute for Mathematical Sciences gives scientists freedom and support to make fundamental discoveries.

Science and Brexit

Science of Business IV

Reigning in Skynet

Building in pictures

Where we publish

Who's talking about us

Who's funding us