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Professor Steven Noble

  • Position: Professor of Theoretical Computer Science
  • Areas of expertise: Combinatorics; Computational complexity; Combinatorial algorithms; Graph theory; Matroid theory; Graph polynomials e.g. the Tutte polynomial; Embedded graphs; Delta-matroids and multimatroids.
  • Email: S.D.Noble@leeds.ac.uk
  • Location: 3.21 Chemistry
  • Website: Googlescholar | Researchgate | ORCID

Profile

I studied for a DPhil “The Complexity of Graph Polynomials” at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dominic Welsh between 1993 and 1997. After holding stipendiary lectureships at New College and Merton I moved to a lectureship at Brunel University in 1998, becoming a senior lecturer in 2010. Between 2012 and 2015 I was head of the department of mathematical sciences at Brunel. In 2016 I moved to a readership in the Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics at Birkbeck, University of London, before becoming Professor of Mathematics in 2023. From 2021 to 2023 I was Assistant Dean for PGR students in the school of Business, Economics and Informatics, and from 2023 I was Education Lead for maths undergraduate programmes. With a love of maths from a very early age and being encouraged to learn programming, aged about 8, by my dad, it was inevitable that my interests should lie in discrete mathematics and algorithms, on the boundary between mathematics and computer science. Until moving to Leeds I was located on the maths side of this boundary, but crossed over by moving to Leeds as Professor of Theoretical Computer Science in the autumn of 2024. 

Research interests

My research involves combinatorial structures such as graphs and matroids. I am particularly interested in problems involving graph / matroid polynomials such as the Tutte polynomial and computational complexity questions. For several years I have been part of a large project, primarily with Iain Moffatt from Royal Holloway, in which we seek to understand the combinatorics of topological graphs, also known as ribbon graphs or cellularly embedded graphs. We have studied topological graphs through the related combinatorial structures of delta-matroids and multimatroids, and demonstrated that the theories of these structures are mutually enriching in a similar way to the theories of graphs and matroids. We are particularly interested in developing, understanding and exploiting Tutte polynomials for these structures. Our work includes the EPSRC funded projects “The critical group of a topological graph: an approach through delta-matroids” and “Hypermaps: polynomials, dualities and minors”.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

  • BA (Oxon) Mathematics
  • DPhil (Oxon) Mathematics
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Student education

I have taught a vast range of mathematics modules at my previous universities at all levels from Foundation Year to Masters level. I have particularly enjoyed teaching first courses in rigorous mathematics to first-year students. I am looking forward to teaching a variety of topics in theoretical computer science.