Professor Anne Taormina is the Head of the Department of Mathematics, King’s College London, and a Professor of mathematical and theoretical particle physics. Anne studied for her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics at Mons University in Belgium. She then moved to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris for postdoctoral research, followed by a Fellowship at CERN and an Enrico Fermi Fellowship at the University of Chicago, before securing an SERC Advanced Fellowship at Durham University. She joined the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Durham University as faculty in 2000 and was promoted to Professor of Mathematics in 2006. She served as the first female Head of the Department of Mathematical Sciences from January 2014 until December 2018, before moving to King’s College London in September 2024.

Anne is a member of the Institute of Physics and of the London Mathematical Society and served on its Council from 2018 to 2024.

Research interests

In her research she exploits the power of symmetry to reduce complicated physical phenomena to their essentials. In particular, she studies the algebraic structures underpinning symmetries to model scenarios contributing to the world-wide effort of theoretical unification of the four known fundamental forces of Nature. In the last 15 years, she has been using lattice techniques in an effort to understand the significance of the appearance of the sporadic group Mathieu 24 in a specific type of superstrings propagating on a K3 surface, following the discovery of traces of its presence in a rewriting of the elliptic genus of K3 in terms of characters of the 2-dimensional N=4 superconformal algebra. 

Further information

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