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Department of Materials, University of Oxford

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Department of Materials, University of Oxford logo

The Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, England was founded in the 1950s as the Department of Metallurgy, by William Hume-Rothery, who was a reader in Oxford's Department of Inorganic Chemistry. It is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division Around 190 staff work in the Department of Materials full-time, including professors, lecturers, independent fellows, researchers and support staff. There are around 30 academic staff positions of which four are Chairs. The Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy was set up in the late 1950s. Sir Peter Hirsch formerly held the chair. The current holder of the chair is Peter Bruce FRS. Other Chairs in the department include the Vesuvius Chair of Materials held by Patrick Grant FREng, Professor in the Physical Examination of Materials formerly held by David Cockayne FRS and the James Martin Chair in Energy Materials held by James Marrow.Research is done in the broad fields of structural and nuclear materials, device materials, polymers and biomaterials, nanomaterials, processing and manufacturing, characterization, and computational materials modelling. The department offers undergraduate degrees in Materials Science and Materials, Economics and Management, having around 160 undergraduates, and around 240 postgraduate students, particularly DPhil students pursuing advanced research.In addition to its own buildings, the department shares seven buildings with the Department of Engineering Science on a triangular plot with Banbury Road to the west and Parks Road to the east. In addition, the department has extensive facilities at Begbroke Science Park, north of the city, which was purchased and founded on behalf of the university by Professor Brian Cantor when he was head of the department in the 1990s.

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Department of Materials, University of Oxford
Parks Road, Oxford City Centre

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N 51.7603685 ° E -1.2592798 °
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Keble Triangle

Parks Road
OX1 3AQ Oxford, City Centre
England, United Kingdom
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Programming Research Group
Programming Research Group

The Programming Research Group (PRG) was part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (OUCL) in Oxford, England, along with the Numerical Analysis Group, until OUCL became the Department of Computer Science in 2011.The PRG was founded by Christopher Strachey (1916–1975) in 1965. It was originally located at 45 Banbury Road. After Strachey's untimely death, C.A.R. Hoare, FRS took over the leadership in 1977. The PRG ethos is summed up by the following quotation from Strachey, found and promulgated by Tony Hoare after he arrived at the PRG: It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious. Much of the practical work done in computing, both in software and in hardware design, is unsound and clumsy because the people who do it have not any clear understanding of the fundamental design principles of their work. Most of the abstract mathematical and theoretical work is sterile because it has no point of contact with real computing. One of the central aims of the Programming Research Group as a teaching and research group has been to set up an atmosphere in which this separation cannot happen. The PRG moved to 8–11 Keble Road in 1984. During the later 1980s and early 1990s, some members of the PRG were housed at 2 South Parks Road, including Joseph Goguen (who was at the PRG during 1988–1996). Tony Hoare retired in 1999 and the PRG was led by Samson Abramsky from 2000. The PRG continued until the renaming of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory to the Department of Computer Science on 1 June 2011, under the leadership of Bill Roscoe, a former member of the PRG.The PRG was a centre of excellence in the field of formal methods, playing a leading role in the development of the Z notation (initiated by a visit of Jean-Raymond Abrial) and CSP (together with the associated Occam programming language). It won Queen's Awards with IBM and Inmos for work in this area.

Blackhall Road, Oxford
Blackhall Road, Oxford

Blackhall Road is a road running between Keble Road to the north and Museum Road to the south in central Oxford, England, dating from the late 19th century. It is named after Black Hall, dating from at least 1519, fronting onto St Giles', and now part of St John's College. Houses in the road were leased by St John's College between 1865–75.Keble College occupies the entire east side of the road, including the O'Reilly Theatre. In the 1970s, the architects Ahrends, Burton and Koralek designed yellow brick buildings on the southern part of Blackhall Road. These include the "Elephant House" at the southern end, nicknamed due to its resemblance to the elephant house at London Zoo.At the southern end on the west side are houses owned by St John's College. At the northern end to the west is the Department of Statistics of the University of Oxford, until 2013 the Mathematical Institute. The historian J.K. Fotheringham (1874–1936), an expert on ancient astronomy and chronology, and Fellow of Magdalen College, lived at 6 Blackhall Road. The classical historian Abel Hendy Jones Greenidge lived at 4 Blackhall Road. The poet and art critic Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy (1890–1965), an associate of the writer D.H. Lawrence, also lived in the road when they met in 1915.The road includes one of the longest lasting and still extant pieces of outdoor graffiti in Oxford. On a brick wall forming part of Keble College, opposite the Department of Statistics building, are two large dinosaurs in white and blue paint. The caption "REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DINOSAUR!" is next to the white dinosaur. By the blue dinosaur, perhaps intended to resemble an alligator, is a riposte "I DID, AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO ME". It is thought that the white graffiti, the earlier of the two, was the work of delegates at the Drapers' Conference at Keble in the early 1970s and was a reply to the students of Keble's neighbour St John's College who had formed the St John’s Destroy Keble Society. Close by in Parks Road is the Oxford University Museum of Natural History where a number of fossilized dinosaur skeletons can be seen. There was a hatching-dinosaur-egg addition on the wall for a while but it has disappeared.