Rate My Professor Jon Chapman

S. Jon Chapman is the Professor of Mathematics and its Applications and Head of the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. He earned his BA in 1989, MA, and DPhil in Applied Mathematics in 1992, all from the University of Oxford. Appointed to his current chair in 1999, Chapman serves as a Fellow of Mansfield College and leads the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His research specializations encompass industrial mathematics, mathematical modelling using partial differential equations, and matched asymptotic expansions alongside exponential asymptotics. These methods are applied to diverse areas including superconductivity and vortices, dislocations in elastic crystals, complex ray theory for high-frequency acoustic and electromagnetic scattering, free-boundary problems, shear-thinning fluids, subcritical transition to turbulence, mathematical finance, asymptotic approximation of eigenvalues, mechanochemical models in developmental biology, mathematical physiology, tumour growth, and nonlinear models of biological tissue. In battery research, he focuses on modelling lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries, addressing mechanical stress from swelling, thermal effects, degradation mechanisms, and electrochemical processes.

Chapman has received major awards including the Johnson Mathematical Prize from Oxford University in 1992, the Richard C. DiPrima Prize from SIAM in 1994, the Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 1998, the Julian Cole Prize from SIAM in 2002, the Naylor Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 2015, and was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2019. His influential publications feature 'Do waveless ships exist? Results for single-cornered hulls' (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2011), 'Exponential asymptotics of localised patterns and snaking bifurcation diagrams' (Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 2009), 'Diffusion of multiple species with excluded-volume effects' (Journal of Chemical Physics, 2012), 'Multiscale modelling of fluid and drug transport in vascular tumours' (Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 2010), and recent contributions such as 'Multihumped collapsing solutions in the nonlinear Schrödinger problem: existence, stability, and dynamics' (SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems, 2026) and 'Physics-Based Battery Model Parametrisation from Impedance Data' (2025). Chapman has delivered public lectures on waves and resonance—from musical instruments to metamaterials—and on M.C. Escher's mathematical art. His work has garnered over 13,000 citations on Google Scholar.